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SELECTIONS 

FROM THE WRITINGS OF 
JAMES RUSSELL*' LOWELL— 



Arranged under the Days of the Year, and 
accompanied by Memoranda of Anniversaries 
of Noted Events and of the Birth or Death 
of Famous Men and Women 



8 
2 3V<5b 



BOSTON AND NEW YORK: HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN 

& co. <tje miterjsi&e $rej5& Cambridge 






Copyright, 1887, 
By HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 

All rights reserved. 



The Riverside Press, Cambridge : 
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co. 



BIRTHDAY VERSES WRITTEN IN A 
CHILD'S ALBUM. 

Thosf awful powers on man that wait, 
On man, the beggar or the king, 
To hovel bare or hall of state 
A magic ring that masters fate 
With each succeeding birthday bring. 

Therein are set four jewels rare : 
Pearl winter, summer's ruby blaze, 
Spring's emerald, and, than all more fair, 
Fall's pensive opal, doomed to bear 
A heart of fire bedreamed with haze. 

To him the simple spell that knows 
The spirits of the ring to sway, 
Fresh power with every sunrise flows, 
And royal pursuivants are those 
That fly his mandates to obey. 

But he that with a slackened will 
Dreams of things past or things to be, 
From him the charm is slipping still, 
And drops, ere he suspect the ill, 
Into the inexorable sea. 



JANUARY 1-3 

1. Emancipation Proclamation, 1863. 
And, as the finder of some unknown realm, 
Mounting a summit whence he thinks to see 
On either side of him the imprisoning sea, 
Beholds, above the clouds that overwhelm 
The valley-land, peak after snowy peak 
Stretch out of sight, each like a silver helm 
Beneath its plume of smoke, sublime and bleak, 
And what he thought an island finds to be 
A continent to him first oped, — so we 
Can from our height of Freedom look along 
A boundless future, ours if we be strong. 

Freedom. 
2. James Wolfe, 1727. 

It is no little thing, when a fresh soul 

And a fresh heart, with their unmeasured scope 

For good, not gravitating earthward yet, 

But circling in diviner periods, 

Are sent into the world. 

On the Death of a Fkiend's Child. 

3. Douglas Jerrold, 1803. 
A right hand guided by an earnest soul, 
With a true instinct, takes the golden prize 
From out a thousand blanks. What men call luck 
Is the prerogative of valiant souls, 
The fealty life pays its rightful kings. 

A Glance Behind the Curtain. 



JANUARY 4-7 

4. Jakob Ludwig Grimm, 1785. 
Winter soon blows your head clear of fog and 
makes you see things as they are. I thank him 
for it. A Good Word for Winter. 

5. Stephen Decatur, 1779. 
Y As one lamp lights another, nor grows less, 
So nobleness enkindleth nobleness^ Yussouf. 

6. Epiphany. 
An entirely new conception of the Infinite and of 
man's relation to it came in with Christianity. That, 
and not the finite, is always the background, con- 
sciously or not. It changed the scene of the last 
act of every drama to the next world. Endless as- 
piration of all the faculties became thus the ideal 
of Christian life, and to express it more or less per- 
fectly the ideal of essentially Christian art. 

Dante. 

7. Israel Putnam, 1718. 
Full many a sweet forewarning hath the mind, 

Full many a whispering of vague desire, 
Ere comes the nature destined to unbind 

Its virgin zone, and all its deeps inspire, — 
Low stirrings in the leaves, before the wind 

Wake all the green strings of the forest lyre, 
Faint beatings in the calyx, ere the rose 
Its warm voluptuous breast doth all unclose, 

A Legend of Brittany. 



JANUARY 8-1 1 

8. Robert Schumann, 1810. 

Here was genius with no volcanic explosions (the 
mechanic result of vulgar gunpowder often), but 
lovely as a Lapland night ; here was fame, not 
sought after nor worn in any cheap French fashion 
as a ribbon at the button-hole, but so gentle, so re- 
tiring, that it seemed no more than an assured and 
emboldened modesty. Cambridge Thirty Years Ago. 

9. Victor Emmanuel died, 1878. 

No age was e'er degenerate, 
Unless men held it at too cheap a rate. 

Harvard Commemoration Ode. 

10. Ethan Allen, 1737. 

All true whole men succeed ; for what is worth 
Success's name, unless it be the thought, 
The inward surety, to have carried out 
A noble purpose to a noble end, 
Although it be the gallows or the block ? 
'T is only Falsehood that doth ever need 
These outward shows of gain to bolster her. 

A Glance Behind the Curtain. 

11. Bayard Taylor, 1825. 

The Public School has done for Imagination. 
What shall I see in Outre-Mer, or on the way 
thither, but what can be seen with eyes ? at Sea. 



JANUARY 12-14 

12. John Winthrop, 1588. 

Be noble ! and the nobleness that lies 
In other men, sleeping, but never dead, 
Will rise in majesty to meet thine own ; 
Then wilt thou see it gleam in many eyes, 
Then will pure light around thy path be shed, 
And thou wilt nevermore be sad and lone. 

Sonnet 4, 

13. 8. P. Chase, 1808. 

The'ry thinks Fact a pooty thing, 

An' wants the banns read right ensuhV; 
But fact wun't noways wear the ring, 

'Thout years o' set tin' up an' wooin' : 
Though, arter all, Time's dial-plate 

Marks cent'ries with the minute-finger, 
An' Good can't never come tu late, 

Though it doos seem to try an' linger. 

Latest Views of Mr. Biglow. 

14. Matthew F. Maury, 1806. 
For every man feels instinctively that all the 
beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a 
single lovely action ; and that while tenderness of 
feeling and susceptibility to generous emotions are 
accidents of temperament, goodness is an achieve- 
ment of the will and a quality of the life. 

Rousseau and the Sentimentalists. 



JANUARY 15-17 

15. Moliere, 1622. 

Thoughts that great hearts once broke for, we 

Breathe cheaply in the common air ; 

The dust we trample heedlessly 

Throbbed once in saints and heroes rare, 

Who perished, opening for their race 

New pathways to the commonplace. Masaccio. 

16. Due d'Aumale, 1822. 
The wind is roistering out of doors, 
My windows shake and my chimney roars ; 
My Elmwood chimneys seem crooning to me, 
As of old, in their moody, minor key, 
And out of the past the hoarse wind blows, 
As I sit in my arm-chair, and toast my toes. 
To Charles Eliot Norton. 

17. Benjamin Franklin, 1706. 
We are fond in this country of what are called 
self-made men (as if real success could ever be 
other) ; and this is all very well, provided they 
make something worth having of themselves. . . . 
The gist of the matter is, not where a man starts 
from, but where he comes out. 

A Great Public Character. 



JANUARY 18-21 

18. Daniel Webster, 1782. 
Is this debating-club where boys dispute, 
And wrangle o'er their stolen fruit, 
The Senate, crewhile cloister of the few, 
Where Clay once flashed and Webster's cloudy 

brow 
Brooded those bolts of thought that all the horizon 

knew ? An Ode for the Fourth of July. 

19. James Watt, 1736. 
We soon had our tea-kettle over the fire, and be- 
fore long the cover was chattering with the escap- 
ing steam, which had thus vainly begged of all men 
to be saddled and bridled, till James Watt one day 
happened to overhear it. a Moosehead Journal. 

20. N. P. Willis, 1807. 

It is not without reason that fame is awarded 
only after death. The dust-cloud of notoriety which 
follows and envelopes the men who drive with the 
wind bewilders contemporary judgment. Lessing. 

21. Adolphe Monod, 1802. 
Reputation is in itself only a farthing-candle, of 

wavering and uncertain flame, and easily blown out, 
but it is the light by which the world looks for and 
finds merit. Keats. 



JANUARY 22-25 

22. Bacon, 1561 ; Byron, 1788. 
As into these vessels the water I pour, 
There shall one hold less, another more, 
And the water unchanged, in every ease, 
Shall put on the figure of the vase ; 
O thou, who wouldst unity make through strife, 
Canst thou fit this sign to the Water of Life ? 

Ambrose. 

23. William Page, 1811. 
We poor fools of time always hurry as if we were 
bhe last type of man. Italy. 

24. Charles James Fox, 1749. 
Men prate 
Of all heads to an equal grade cashiered 
On level with the dullest, and expect 
(Sick of no worse distemper than themselves) 
A wondrous cure-all in equality ; 
They reason that To-morrow must be wise 
Because To-day was not, nor Yesterday, 
As if good days were shapen of themselves, 
Not of the very lifeblood of men's souls. 

The Cathedral. 

25. Bobert Burns, 1759. 
Burns, who was more out of doors than most 
poets, and whose barefoot Muse got the color in her 
3heeks by vigorous exercise in all weathers. 

A Good Word b-or Winter. 



JANUARY 26-28 

26- Thomas Noon Talfourd, 1795. 
I have spoken of the exquisite curves of snovi 
surfaces. Not less rare are the tints of which the} 
are capable, — the faint blue of the hollows, for the 
shadows in snow are always blue, and the tendei 
rose of higher points, as you stand with your back 
to the setting sun and look upward across the soft 
rondure of a hillside. I have seen within a mile oi 
home effects of color as lovely as any iridescence oi 
the Silberhorn after sundown. 

A Good Word for Winter. 

27. W. A. Mozart, 1756. 
For, whom the heart of man shuts out, 

Sometimes the heart of God takes in, 
And fences them all round about 

With silence mid the world's loud din, 
And one of his great charities 

Is Music. The Forlorn. 

28. Charles George Gordon, 1833. 
The true ideal is not opposed to the real, nor is it 
any artificial heightening thereof, but lies in it, and 
blessed are the eyes that find it ! It is the mens 
divinior which hides within the actual, transfiguring 
matter-of-fact into matter-of-meaning for him who 
has the gift of second-sight. Shakespeare Once More. 



JANUARY 29-31 

29. Swedenborg, 1688. 
His nature [Dante's] was one in which, as in 
Swedenborg's, a clear practical understanding was 
continually streamed over by the northern lights of 
mysticism through which the familiar stars shine 
with a softened and more spiritual lustre. Dante. 

30. Walter Savage Landor, 1775. 
Children learn to speak by watching the lips and 
catching the words of those who know how already, 
and poets learn in the same way from their elders. 
They import their raw material from any and every- 
where, and the question at last comes down to this 
— whether an author have original force enough to 
assimilate all he has acquired, or that be so over- 
mastering as to assimilate him. If the poet turn 
out the stronger, we allow him to help himself from 
other people with wonderful equanimity. Should 
a man discover the art of transmuting metals and 
present us with a lump of gold as large as an os- 
trich-egg, would it be in human nature to inquire 

too nicely whether he had stolen the lead ? 

Chaucer. 

31. Franz Schubert, 1797. 
Feeling and music move together, 
Like swan and shadow ever, 
Floating on a sky-blue river 
In a day of cloudless weather. 

To Perdita, Singing. 



FEBRUARY 1-4 

1. Edmund Quincy, 1808. 
As thrills of long-hushed tone 
Live in the viol, so our souls grow fine 
With keen vibrations from the touch divine 
Of noble natures gone. Memorise Positum. 

2. Candlemas. 
Blessing she is : God made her so, 
And deeds of week-day holiness 
Fall from her noiseless as the snow, 
Nor hath she ever chanced to know 
That aught were easier than to bless. 

My Love. 
3. Mendelssohn, 1809. 
One has not far to seek for book-nature, artist- 
nature, every variety of superinduced nature, in 
short, but genuine human-nature is hard to find. 
And how good it is ! Wholesome as a potato, fit 
company for any dish. The freemasonry of culti- 
vated men is agreeable, but artificial, and I like 
better the natural grip with which manhood recog- 
nizes manhood. I N the Mediterranean. 

4. Josiah Quincy, 1772. 
It is such a piece of good luck to be natural I It 
is the good gift which the fairy godmother brings 
to her prime favorites in the cradle. Chaucer. 



FEBRUARY 5-7 

5. James Otis, 1725. 
As the broad ocean endlessly unheaveth, 
With the majestic beating of his heart, 
The mighty tides, whereof its rightful part 
Each sea-wide bay and little weed receiveth, — - 
So through his soul who earnestly believeth. 
Life from the universal Heart doth flow, 
Whereby some conquest of the eternal Woe, 
By instinct of God's nature, he achieveth. 

Sonnet 24. 

6. Madame de Se'vigng, 1626. 
Take Winter as you find him, and he turns out to 
be a thoroughly honest fellow, with no nonsense in 
him, and tolerating none in you, which is a great 
comfort in the long run. He is not what they call 
a genial critic ; but bring a real man along with 
you, and you will find there is a crabbed generosity 
about the old cynic that you would not exchange 
for all the creamy concessions of Autumn. 

A Good Word for Winter. 

7. Charles Dickens, 1812. 
The secret of force in writing lies not so much 
in the pedigree of nouns and adjectives and verbs, 
as in having something that you believe in to say, 
and making the parts of speech vividly conscious 
of it. Shakespeare Once More. 



FEBRUARY 8-1 1 

8. Samuel Butler, 1612. 
No mortal ever dreams 

That tlie scant isthmus he encamps upon 
Between two oceans, one, the Stormy, passed, 
And one, the Peaceful, yet to venture on, 
Has been that future whereto prophets yearned 
For the fulfilment of Earth's cheated hope, 
Shall be that past which nerveless poets moan 
As the lost opportunity of song. the Cathedral. 

9. James Parton, 1822. 

We 're curus critters : Now ain't jes' the minute 
That ever fits us easy while we 're in it ; 
Long ez 't wuz futur', 't would be perfect bliss, — 
Soon ez it 's past, thet time 's wuth ten o' this. 

Sunthin' in the Pastoral Line. 

10. Charles Lamb, 1775. 
Fastidiousness is only another form of egotism ; 
and all men who know not where to look for truth 
save in the narrow well of self will find their own 
image at the bottom, and mistake it for what they 
are seeking. Rousseau and the Sentimentalists. 

11. Lydia Maria Child, 1802. 
Those love truth best who to themselves are true, 
And what they dare to dream of, dare to do. 

Harvard Commemoration Ode. 



FEBRUARY 12-15 

12. Abraham Lincoln, 1809. 

Mr. Lincoln's faith in God was qualified by a very- 
well-founded distrust of the wisdom of man. Per- 
haps it was his want of self-confidence that more 
than anything else won him the unlimited confidence 
of the people, for they felt that there would be no 
need of retreat from any position he had deliber- 
ately taken. 

History will rank Mr. Lincoln among the most 
prudent of statesmen and the most successful of 
rulers. Abraham Lincoln. 

13. Talleyrand, 1754. 
Looking within myself, I note how thin 
A plank of station, chance or prosperous fate, 
Doth fence me from the clutching waves of sin. 

Si Descendero in Infernum, Ades. 

14. Edmond About, 1828. 
Heaven is not mounted to on wings of dreams, 
Nor doth the unthankful happiness of youth 
Aim thitherward, but floats from bloom to bloom, 
With earth's warm patch of sunshine well content. 
On the Death of a Friend's Child. 

15. Ash Wednesday. 
'T is sorrow builds the shining ladder up, 
Whose golden rounds are our calamities, 
Whereon our firm feet planting, nearer God 
The spirit climbs, and hath its eyes unsealed. 

On the Death of a Friend's Child. 



FEBRUARY 16-18 

16. Philip Melanchthon, 1497. 
Endurance is the crowning quality, 
And patience all the passion of great hearts. 

Columbus. 

If we could only carry that slow, imperturbable 
old clock of Opportunity, that never strikes a second 
too soon or too late, in our fobs, and push the hands 
forward as we can those of our watches ! 

Cambridge Thirty Years Ago. 

17. Michael Angelo died, 1564, 
Good luck is the willing handmaid of upright, 
energetic character, and conscientious observance of 
duty. Wordsworth. 

18. George Peabody, 1795. 
There has been no period of time in which wealth 
has been more sensible of its duties than now. It 
builds hospitals, it establishes missions among the 
poor, it endows schools. It is one of the advantages 
of accumulated wealth, and of the leisure it renders 
possible, that people have time to think of the wants 
and sorrows of their fellows. But all these reme- 
dies are partial and palliative merely. It is as if we 
should apply plasters to a single pustule of the 
small-pox with a view of driving out the disease. 
The true way is to discover and to extirpate the 
germs. Democracy. 



FEBRUARY 19-21 

19. First Sunday in Lent. 

Through aisles of long-drawn centuries 

My spirit walks in thought, 
And to that symbol lifts its eyes 

Which God's own pity wrought ; 
Froni Calvary shines the altar's gleam, 

The Church's East is there, 
The Ages one great minster seem, 

That throbs with praise and prayer. 

And all the way from Calvary down 

The carven pavement shows 
Their graves who won the martyr's crown 

And safe in God repose ; 
The saints of many a warring creed 

Who now in heaven have learned 
That all paths to the father lead 

Where Self the feet have spurned. 

Godminster Chimes. 

20. David Garrick, 1716. 

One learns more metaphysics from a single 
temptation than from all the philosophers. 

A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL- 

21. John Henry Newman, 1801. 
One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilder- 
ness of warning. Shakespeare Once More. 



FEBRUARY 22-25 

22. George Washington, 1732 ; J". B. Lowell, 1819. 
Virginia gave us this imperial man 
Cast in the massive mould 
Of those high-statured ages old 
Which into grander forms our mortal metal ran ; 
She gave us this unblemished gentleman. 

Under the Old Elm. 

If God made poets for anything, it was to keep 
alive the traditions of the pure, the holy, and the 
beautiful. Pope. 

23. G. F. Handel, 1685. 
Vanity eludes recognition by its victims in more 
shapes, and more pleasing, than any other passion. 

Rousseau and the Sentimentalists. 

24. George William Curtis, 1824. 
It is singular how impatient men are with over- 
praise of others, how patient with overpraise of 
themselves ; and yet the one does them no injury, 
while the other may be their ruin. 

Literary Remains op the Rev. Homer Wilbur. 

25. Charles C. Pinckney, 1766. 
Mishaps are like knives, that either serve us or 
cut us, as we grasp them by the blade or the handle. 

Cambridge Thirty Years Ago, 



FEBRUARY 26-29 

26. Second Sunday in Lent. 
There are three short and simple words, the hardest 
of all to pronounce in any language (and I suspect 
they were no easier before the confusion of tongues), 
but which no man or nation that cannot utter can 
claim to have arrived at manhood. Those words 
are, 7" was wrong. Letter op the Rev. Homer Wilbur. 

27. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1807. 
With loving breath of all the winds his name 
Is blown about the world, but to his friends 
A sweeter secret hides behind his fame, 
And love steals shyly through the loud acclaim, 
To murmur a God bless you ! and there ends. 

To H. W. L. 

28. Michel de Montaigne, 1533. 
For manhood is the one immortal thing 
Beneath Time's changeful sky, 
And, where it lightened once, from age to age, 
Men come to learn, in grateful pilgrimage, 
That length of days is knowing when to die. 

Ode read at Concord. 

29. Eossini, 1792. 
They think I burrow from the sun, 
In darkness, all alone, and weak ; 
Such loss were gain if He were won, 
For J t is the sun's own Sun I seek. 

The Miner. 



MARCH 1-3 

1. W. D. Howells, 1837. 
Talent is that which is in a man's power ; genius 
is that in whose power a man is. 

Rousseau and the Sentimentalists. 

2. Sir Thomas Bodley, 1544. 
These rugged, wintry days I scarce could bear, 
Did I not know, that, in the early spring, 
When wild March winds upon their errands sing, 
Thou wouldst return, bursting on the still air, 
Like those same winds, when, startled from their 

lair, 
They hunt up violets, and free swift brooks 
From icy cares, even as thy clear looks 
Bid my heart bloom, and sing, and break all care : 
When drops with welcome rain the April day, 
My flowers shall find their April in thine eyes, 
Save there the rain in dreamy clouds doth stay, 
As loath to fall out of those happy skies ; 
Yet sure, my love, thou art most like to May, 
That comes with steady sun when April dies. 

In Absence. 

3. Edmund Waller, 1606. 
He is a coward, who would borrow 
A charm against the present sorrow 
From the vague Future's promise of delight. 

To the Future. 



MARCH 4-6 

4. Third Sunday in Lent. 

The divine reason must forever manifest itself 
anew in the lives of men, and that as individuals. 
This atonement with God, this identification of the 
man with the truth, so that right action shall not 
result from the lower reason of utility, but from the 
higher of a will so purified of self as to sympathize 
by instinct with the eternal laws, is not something 
that can be done once for all, that can become his- 
toric and traditional, a dead flower pressed between 
the leaves of the family Bible, but must be renewed 
in every generation, and in the soul of every man, 
that it may be valid. Dante. 

5. James Madison, 1751. 

Three roots bear up Dominion : Knowledge, Will, — 
These twain are strong, but stronger yet the 

third, — 
Obedience, — 't is the great tap-root that still, 
Knit round the rock of Duty, is not stirred, 
Though Heaven-loosed tempests spend their utmost 

skill. The Washers of the Shroud. 

6. Michael Angelo, 1475. 

Michael Angelo created a new world in which 
everything was colossal. 

A Few Bits of Roman Mosaic. 



MARCH 7-10 

7. Sir Edwin Landseer, 1802. 
Browning has given the best picture of St. Peter's 
on a festival day, sketching it with a few verses in 
his large style. And doubtless it is the scene of the 
grandest spectacles which the world can see in these 
latter days. A Few Bits of Roman Mosaic. 

8. Christopher P. Cranch, 1813. 
Where'er a human heart doth wear 
Joy's myrtle- wreath or sorrow's gyves, 
Where'er a human spirit strives 
After a life more true and fair, 
There is the true man's birthplace grand, 
His is a world-wide fatherland ! 

The Fatherland. 

9. William Cobbett, 1762. 
As soon as we have discovered the word for our 
joy or sorrow we are no longer its serfs, but its 
lords. Keats. 

10. Alexander III. of Bussia, 1845. 
When I wuz younger 'n wut you see me now, — 
Nothin' from Adam's fall to Huldy's bonnet, 
Thet I warn 't full-cocked with my jedgment on it ; 
But now I 'm gittin' on in life, I find 
It 's a sight harder to make up my mind. 

Sunthin' in the Pastoral Line. 



MARCH 1 1-13 

11. Fourth Sunday in Lent. 

God is not dumb, that He should speak no more ; 
If thou hast wanderings in the wilderness 
And find'st not Sinai, 't is thy soul is poor ; 
There towers the mountain of the Voice no less, 
Which whoso seeks shall find. Bibliolatres. 

12. Bishop Berkeley, 1684. 
Peace is more strong than war, and gentleness, 

Where force were vain, makes conquest o'er the 
wave ; 
And love lives on and hath a power to bless, 
When they who loved are hidden in the grave. 
Elegy on the Death of Dr. Channing. 

13. Joseph Priestley, 1733. 

Count me o'er earth's chosen heroes, — they were 
souls that stood alone, 

While the men they agonized for hurled the con- 
tumelious stone, 

Stood serene, and down the future saw the golden 
beam incline 

To the side of perfect justice, mastered by their 
faith divine, 

By one man's plain truth to manhood and to God's 
supreme design. The Present Crisis. 



MARCH 14-17 

14. Victor Emmanuel, 1820 ; Humbert, 1844. 
The brave makes danger opportunity ; 
The waverer, paltering with the chance sublime, 
Dwarfs it to peril. The Washers op the Shroud. 

15. Andrew Jackson, 1767. 

No very large share of truth falls to the appre- 
hension of any one man ; let him keep it sacred and 
beware of repeating it till it turn to falsehood on his 
lips by becoming ritual. Carlyle. 

16. Caroline Herschel, 1750. 
Truth is eternal, but her effluence, 

With endless change is fitted to the hour. 

A Glance Behind the Curtain. 

17. Madame Boland, 1754. 

I cannot conceive the confusion of tongues to have 
been the curse of Babel, since I esteem my igno- 
rance of other languages as a kind of Martello-tower, 
in which I am safe from the furious bombardments 
of foreign garrulity. 

Letter op the Rev. Homer Wilbur. 

Indeed, the power to express the same nothing in 
ten different languages is something to be dreaded 
rather than admired. It gives a horrible advantage 
to dumess. Life and Letters of James Gates Percival. 



MARCH 18-20 

18. Fifth Sunday in Lent. 

All God's angels come to us disguised ; 
Sorrow and sickness, poverty and death, 
One after other lift their frowning masks, 
And we behold the seraph's face beneath, 
All radiant with the glory and the calm 
Of having looked upon the front of God. 
With every anguish of our earthly part 
The spirit's sight grows clearer. 

On the Death op a Friend's Child. 

19. David Livingstone, 1813. 
People are apt to confound mere alertness of 
mind with attention. The one is but the flying 
abroad of all the faculties to the open doors and 
windows at every passing rumor ; the other is the 
concentration of every one of them in a single 
focus, as in the alchemist over his alembic at the 
moment of expected projection. Attention is the 
stuff that memory is made of, and memory is ac- 
cumulated genius. 

Literary Remains of the Rev. Homer Wilbur. 

20. Sir Isaac Newton died, 1727. 
How very small a part of the world we truly live 
in is represented by what speaks to us through the 
senses when compared with that vast realm of the 
mind which is peopled by memory and imagination, 
and with such shining inhabitants ! 

Books and Lieraries. 



MARCH 21-24 

21. Sebastian Bach, 1685. 
It [the sea] reminds me of organ music and my 
good friend Sebastian Bach. A fugue or two will 
do very well ; but a concert made up of nothing 
else is altogether too epic for me. At Sea. 

/ 
22. Emperor William of Germany, 1797. 

Nor can I count him happiest who has never 
Been forced with his own hand his chains to sever, 
And for himself find out the way divine ; 
He never knew the aspirer's glorious pains, 
He never earned the struggle's priceless gains. 

Trial. 

23. Laplace, 1749. 
There is something solid and doughty in the man 
that can rise from defeat, the stuff of which vic- 
tories are made in due time, when we are able to 
choose our position better, and the sun is at our 
back. Dryden. 

24. Longfellow died, 1882. 
Surely if skill in song the shears may stay 
And of its purpose cheat the charmed abyss, 
If our poor life be lengthened by a lay, 
He shall not go, although his presence may, 
And the next age in praise shall double this. 

To H. W. L. 



MARCH 25-28 

25. Palm Sunday. 

There are who triumph in a losing cause, 
Who can put on defeat, as 't were a wreath 
Unwithering in the adverse popular breath, 

Safe from the blasting demagogue's applause ; 

'T is they who stand for Freedom and God's 
laws. To John G. Palfrey. 

26. Nathaniel Bowditch, 1773. 
A race of nobles may die out, 
A royal line may leave no heir ; 
Wise Nature sets no guards about 
Her pewter plate and wooden ware. 
But they fail not, the kinglier breed, 
Who starry diadems attain ; 
To dungeon, axe, and stake succeed 
Heirs of the old heroic strain. Kossuth. 

27. Vera Cruz taken by Scott, 1847. 
To have stored moral capital enough to meet the 
drafts of Death at sight, must be an unmatched 
tonic. A Great Public Character. 

28. Thomas Clarkson, 1760. 
Death ever fronts the wise ; 
Not fearfully, but with clear promises 
Of larger life. Prometheus, 



MARCH 29-31 

29. Swedenborg died, 1772. 

Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her 
wretched crust, 

Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and 't is pros- 
perous to be just ; 

Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward 
stands aside, 

Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is cruci- 
fied, ijjj^, p RESENT Crisis. 

30. Good Friday. 

By the light of burning heretics Christ's bleeding 
feet I track, 

Toiling up new Calvaries ever with the cross that 
turns not back, 

And these mounts of anguish number how each gen- 
eration learned 

One new word of that grand Credo which in prophet- 
hearts hath burned 

Since the first man stood God-conquered, with his 
face to heaven upturned. The Present Crisis. 

31. Joseph Haydn, 1732. 
Hide still, best Good, in subtile wise, 

Beyond my nature's utmost scope ; 
Be ever absent from mine eyes 

To be twice present in my hope ! the Miner. 



APRIL 1-3 

1. Easter Day. 

O chime of sweet Saint Charity, 

Peal soon that Easter morn 
When Christ for all shall risen be, 

And in all hearts new-born ! 

GODMLNSTER CHIMES. 

2. R. C Andersen, 1805. 

Those Easter pomps, where the antique world 
marches visibly before you in gilded mail and crim- 
son doublet, refresh the eyes, and are good so long 
as they continue to be merely spectacle. But if one 
thinks for a moment of the servant of the servants 
of the Lord in cloth of gold, borne on men's shoul- 
ders, or of the children receiving the blessing of 
their Holy Father, with a regiment of French sol- 
diers to protect the father from the children, it be- 
comes a little sad. A Few Bits of Roman Mosaic. 

3. Washington Irving, 1783. 
What ! Irving ? thrice welcome, 
Warm heart and fine brain, 
You bring back the happiest spirit from Spain, 
And the gravest sweet humor, that ever were there 
Since Cervantes met death in his gentle despair. 

A Fable for Critics. 



APRIL 4-7 

4. Benjamin Peirce, 1809. 
Few men learn the highest use of books. After 
lifelong study many a man discovers too late that to 
have had the philosopher's stone availed nothing 
without the philosopher to use it. 

Books and Libraries. 

5. Sir Henry Havelock, 1795. 
Men's monuments, grown old, forget their names 
They should eternize, but the place 
Where shining souls have passed imbibes a grace 
Beyond mere earth ; some sweetness of their fames 
Leaves in the soil its unextinguished trace, 
Pungent, pathetic, sad with nobler aims, 
That penetrates our lives and heightens them or 
shames. Under the Old Elm. 

6. Raphael born, 1483, and died, 1520. 
One beauty, at its highest, prophesies 
That by whose side it shall seem mean and poor. 

Sonnet 17. 
7. Wordsworth, 1770. 
If it be one of the baser consolations, it is also one 
of the most disheartening concomitants of long life, 
that we get used to everything. Two things, per- 
haps, retain their freshness more perdurably than 
the rest, — the return of spring, and the more poig- 
nant utterances of the poets. And here, I think, 
Wordsworth holds his own with the best. 

Address as President of the Wordsworth Society. 



APRIL 8-11 

8. G. W. Greene, 1811. 

Wealth and rule slip down with Fortune, as her 
wheel turns round ; 

He who keeps his faith, he only cannot be dis- 
crowned. Mahmood the Image Breaker. 

9. Fisher Ames, 1758. 
The world always judges a man (and rightly 
enough, too) by his little faults, which he shows a 
hundred times a day, rather than by his great vir- 
tues, which he discloses perhaps but once in a life- 
time, and to a single person, — nay, in proportion 
as they are rarer, and he is nobler, is shyer of let- 
ting their existence be known at all. 

Cambridge Thirty Years Ago. 

10. Lew Wallace, 1827. 
Nor deem that acts heroic wait on chance 
Or easy were as in a boy's romance ; 
The man's whole life preludes the single deed 
That shall decide if his inheritance 
Be with the sifted few of matchless breed, 
Our race's sap and sustenance, 
Or with the unmotived herd that only sleep and 
feed. Under the Old Elm. 

11. Edward Everett, 1794. 
But Chance is like an amberill, — it don't take twice 
to lose it. 

BlRDOPREDUM SAWIN, ESQ., TO Mfi. F.OSEA BlGLOW, 



APRIL 12-14 
12. Henry Clay, 1777. 
The busy world shoves angrily aside 
The man who stands with arms akimbo set, 
Until occasion tells him what to do ; 
And he who waits to have his task marked out 
Shall die and leave his errand unfulfilled. 

A Glance Behind the Curtain. 

13. Fall of Fort Sumter, 1861. 

Bow down, dear Land, for thou hast found release ! 
Thy God, in these distempered days, 
Hath taught thee the sure wisdom of His ways, 
And through thine enemies hath wrought thy peace ! 

Bow down in prayer and praise ! 
No poorest in thy borders but may now 
Lift to the juster skies a man's enfranchised brow. 
Harvard Commemoration Ode. 

14. Lincoln assassinated, 1865. 

But democracies have likewise their finer instincts. 
I have also seen the wisest statesman and most preg- 
nant speaker of our generation, a man of humble 
birth and ungainly manners, of little culture beyond 
what his own genius supplied, become more ab- 
solute in power than any monarch of modern times 
through the reverence of his countrymen for his 
honesty, his wisdom, his sincerity, his faith in God 
and man, and the nobly humane simplicity of his 
character. . . . Institutions which could bear and 
breed such men as Lincoln and Emerson had surely 
some energy for good. Democracy. 



APRIL 15-18 

15. John Lothrop Motley, 1814. 

Amid all the fruitless turmoil and miscarriage of 
the world, if there be one thing steadfast and of 
favorable omen, one thing to make optimism dis- 
trust its own obscure distrust, it is the rooted in- 
stinct in men to admire what is better and more 
beautiful than themselves. Democracy. 

16. Battle of Culloden, 1746. 
Aprul 's come back ; the swellin' buds of oak 
Dim the fur hillsides with a purplish smoke ; 
The brooks are loose an', singing to be seen, 
(Like gals,) make all the hollers soft an' green ; 
The birds are here, for all the season 's late ; 
They take the sun's height an' don' never wait ; 
Soon 'z he officially declares it 's spring 

Their light hearts lift 'em on a north'ard wing, 
An' th' ain't an acre, fur ez you can hear, 
Can't by the music tell the time o' year. 

* Mr. Hosea Biglow's Speech in March Meeting. 

17. William Gilmore Shnms, 1806. 
I think the human mind pines more or less where 
everything is new, and is better for a diet of stale 
bread. A Moosehead Journal. 

18. Luther before the Diet of Worms, 1521. 
Get but the truth once uttered, and 't is like 
A star new-born, that drops into its place. 

A Glance Behind the Curtain. 



APRIL 19-21 

^ 19. Lexington and Concord, 1775. 

It was the drums of Naseby and Dunbar that 
gathered the minute-men on Lexington Common ; 
it was the red dint of the axe on Charles's block 
that marked One in our era. 

New England Two Centuries Ago. 

20. W. H. Furness, 1802. 
He reads most wisely who thinks everything into 
a book that it is capable of holding, and it is the 
stamp and token of a great book so to incorporate 
itself with our own being, so to quicken our insight 
and stimulate our thought, as to make us feel as if 
we helped to create it while we read. 

Books and Libraries. 

21. Charlotte Bronte, 1816. 
Whither leads the path 
To ampler fates that leads ? 
Not down through flowery meads, 
To reap an aftermath 
Of youth's vainglorious weeds, 
But up the steep, amid the wrath 
And shock of deadly-hostile creeds, 
Where the world's best hope and stay 
By battle's flashes gropes a desperate way, 
And every turf the fierce foot clings to bleeds. 
Harvard Commemoration Ode. 



APRIL 22-24 
22. Henry Fielding, 1707. 
Enthusiasm begets enthusiasm, eloquence pro- 
duces conviction for the moment, but it is only by 
truth to nature and the everlasting intuitions of 
mankind that those abiding influences are won that 
enlarge from generation to generation. 

Rousseau and the Sentimentalists. 

23. Shakespeare born, 1564, and died, 1616. 
And it is certainly true that the material of 
thought reacts upon the thought itself. Shakes- 
peare himself would have been commonplace had he 
been paddocked in a thinly- shaven vocabulary, and 
Phidias, had he worked in wax, only a more inspired 
Mrs. Jarley. A man is known, says the proverb, 
by the company he keeps, and not only so, but made 
by it. Books and Libraries. 

24. Anthony Trollope, 1815. 
But higher even than the genius we rate the char- 
acter of this unique man, and the grand imperson- 
ality of what he wrote. What has he told us of 
himself ? In our self-exploiting nineteenth century, 
with its melancholy liver-complaint, how serene and 
high he seems ! If he had sorrows, he has made 
them the woof of everlasting consolation to his 
kind ; and if, as poets are wont to whine, the out- 
ward world was cold to him, its biting air did but 
trace itself in loveliest frost-work of fancy on the 
many windows of that self-centred and cheerful 
soul. Shakespeare Once More. 



APRIL 25-28 

25. Oliver Cromwell, 1599. 

One may find grandeur in a starlight night with- 
out caring to ask what it means, save grandeur and 
consolation. . . . One may think roses as good in 
their way as cabbages, though the latter would make 
a better show in the witness-box if cross-examined 
as to their usefulness. Emerson the Lecturer. 

26. J. L. Uhland, 1787. 
Spring is a fickle mistress, who either does not 
know her own mind, or is so long in making it up, 
whether you shall have her or not have her, that one 
gets tired at last of her pretty miffs and reconcilia- 
tions. You go to her to be cheered up a bit, and 
ten to one catch her in the sulks, expecting you to 
find enough good humor for both. 

A Good Word for Winter. 

27. U. S. Grant, 1822. 
To front a lie in arms and not to yield, 
This shows, methinks, God's plan 
And measure of a stalwart man. 

Commemoration Ode. 

28. James Monroe, 1758. 
An' his gret sword behind him sloped away 
Long 9 z a man's speech thet dunno wut to say. 
Sunthin' in the Pastoral Line. 



APRIL 29-MAY 2 

29. Oliver Ellsworth, 1745. 
Leave what to do and what to spare 
To the inspiring moment's care, 

Nor ask for payment 
Of fame or gold, but just to wear 

Unspotted raiment. Fancy's Casuistry. 

30. Duke of Argyll, 1823. 

It is as easy — and no easier — to be natural in 
a salon as in a swamp, if one do not aim at it, for 
what we call unnaturalness always has its spring in 
a man's thinking too much about himself. 

Thoreau. 

MAY 

1. Joseph Addison, 1672. 

Jes' so with poets : Wut they Ve airly read, 
Git kind o' worked into their heart an' head, 

This makes 'em think our fust of May is May, 
Which 't ain't, for all the almanicks can say. 

Sunthin' in the Pastoral Line. 

2. John Gorham Palfrey, 1796. 
I take my May down from the happy shelf 
Where perch the world's rare song-birds in a row. 

Under the Willows. 



MAY 3-5 

3. M&cchiavelli, 1469. 
There is no good in arguing with the inevitable. 
The only argument available with an east wind is to 
put on your overcoat. Democracy. 

4. William H. Prescott, 1796. 
1 In spite of the proverb, great effects do not follow 
from small causes, — that is, disproportionately 
small, — but from adequate causes acting under 
certain required conditions. To contrast the size of 
the oak with that of the parent acorn, as if the poor 
seed had paid all costs from its slender strong-box, 
may serve for a child's wonder ; but the real miracle 
lies in that divine league which bound all the forces 
of nature to the service of the tiny germ in fulfilling 
its destiny. Abraham Lincoln. 

5. Empress Eugenie, 1826. 
Year by year, more and more of the world gets 
disenchanted. Even the icy privacy of the arctic 
and antarctic circles is invaded. Our youth are no 
longer ingenious, as indeed no ingenuity is demanded 
of them. Everything is accounted for, everything 
cut and dried, and the world may be put together 
as easily as the fragments of a dissected map. The 
Mysterious bounds nothing now on the JSTorth, South, 
East, or West. We have played Jack Horner 
with our earth, till there is never a plum left in it. 

At Sea. 






MAY 6-8 

6. Lord Frederick Cavendish and Mr. Burke assassinated, 

1882. 

Beauty and Truth, and all that these contain, 
Drop not like ripened fruit about our feet ; 

We climb to them through years of sweat and 
pain ; 

Without long struggle, none did e'er attain 
The downward look from Quiet's blissful seat : 

Though present loss may be the hero's part, 

Yet none can rob him of the victor heart 
Whereby the broad-realmed future is subdued. 

To John G. Palfeey. 

7. Robert Browning, 1812. 
Browning, by far the richest nature of the time, 
becomes more difficult, draws nearer to the all-for- 
point fashion of the concettisti with every poem he 
writes. Swinburne's Teagedies. 

8. Alessandro Manzoni, 1785. 
History is, indeed, mainly the biography of a few 
imperial men, and forces home upon us the useful 
lesson how infinite simally important our own private 
affairs are to the universe in general. History is 
clarified experience, and yet how little do men profit 
by it ; nay, how should we expect it of those who so 
seldom are taught anything by their own ! 

Books and Libeaeies. 



MAY 9-12 

9. Sismondi, 1773. 

Desultory reading, except as conscious pastime, 
hebetates the brain and slackens the bow-string of 
Will. It communicates as little intelligence as the 
messages that run along the telegraph wire to the 
birds that perch on it. Books and Libraries. 

10. Ascension Day. 

A higher mode of belief is the best exorciser, be- 
cause it makes the spiritual at one with the actual 
world instead of hostile, or at best alien. It has 
been the grossly material interpretations of spiritual 
doctrine that have given occasion to the two extremes 
of superstition and unbelief. Witchcraft. 

11. Dr. John Brown died, 1882. 
Though I own up I like our back'ard springs 
Thet kind o' haggle with their greens an' things, 
An' when you 'most give up, 'ithout more words 
Toss the fields full o' blossoms, leaves, an' birds : 
Thet 's Northun natur', slow an' apt to doubt, 
But when it doos git stirred, ther' 's no gin-out ! 

Sunthin' in the Pastoral Line. 

12. Dante Gabriel Bossetti, 1828. 

It is our lawless and uncertain thoughts, it is the 
indefiniteness of our impressions, that fill darkness, 
whether mental or physical, with spectres and hob- 
goblins. Democracy. 



MAY 13-16 

13. Empress Maria Theresa, 1717. 
I grieve not that ripe Knowledge takes away 
The charm that Nature to my childhood wore, 
For, with that insight, cometh, day by day, 
A greater bliss than wonder was before ; 
The real doth not clip the poet's wings, — 
To win the secret of a weed's plain heart 
Reveals some clew to spiritual things, 
And stumbling guess becomes firm-footed art. 

Sonnet 25. 

14. Constitutional Convention met, 1787. 
Perhaps it is fortunate to have an unwritten Con- 
stitution, for men are prone to be tinkering the work 
of their own hands, whereas they are more willing 
to let time and circumstance mend or modify what 
time and circumstance have made. Democracy. 

15. Prince Metternich, 1773. 
Thou art my tropics and mine Italy ; 
To look at thee unlocks a warmer clime ; 

The eyes thou givest me 
Are in the heart and heed not space or time. 

To a Dandelion. 

16. William H. Seward, 1801, 
Every truth of morals must be redemonstrated in 
the experience of the individual man before he is 
capable of utilizing it. Dante. 



MAY 17-19 

17. Edward Jenner, 1749. 
Wrong ever builds on quicksands, but the Right 
To the firm centre lays its moveless base. 
The tyrant trembles, if the air but stirs 
The innocent ringlets of a child's free hair, 
And crouches, when the thought of some great spirit, 
With world-wide murmur, like a rising gale, 
Over men's hearts, as over standing corn, 
Rushes, and bends them to its own strong will. 

Prometheus. 

18. Samuel Hoar, 1778. 
Alas, it is we ourselves that are getting buried 
alive under this avalanche of earthy impertinences ! 
It is we who, while we might each in his humble 
way be helping our fellows into the right path, or 
adding one block to the climbing spire of a fine soul, 
are willing to become mere sponges saturated from 
the stagnant goosepond of village gossip. This is 
the kind of news we compass the globe to catch, 
fresh from Bungtown Centre, when we might have 
it fresh from heaven by the electric lines of poet or 
prophet. Books and Libraries. 



19. Hawthorne died, 1864. 
The Puritanism of the past found its unwilling 
poet in Hawthorne, the rarest creative imagination 
of the century. The rarest in some ideal respects 
since Shakespeare. Thoreau. 






MAY 20-22 

20. Whitsunday, 

We see but half the causes of our deeds, 
Seeking them wholly in the outer life, 
And heedless of the encircling spirit-world, 
Which, though unseen, is felt, and sows in us 
All germs of pure and world-wide purposes. 
From one stage of our being to the next 
We pass unconscious o'er a slender bridge, 
The momentary work of unseen hands, 
Which crumbles down behind us ; looking back, 
We see the other shore, the gulf between, 
And, marvelling how we won to where we stand, 
Content ourselves to call the builder Chance. 

A Glance Behind the Curtain. 

21. Elizabeth Fry, 1780. 

Not suffering, but faint heart, is worst of woes. 

The Washers of the Shroud. 

22. Richard Wagner, 1813. 
The Opera is the closest approach we have to the 
ancient drama in the essentials of structure and 
presentation ; and could we have a libretto founded 
on a national legend and written by one man of 
genius to be filled out and accompanied by the music 
of another, we might hope for something of the 
Same effect upon the stage. Swinburne's Tragedies, 



MAY 23-26 

23. Thomas Hood, 1798. 

The only conclusive evidence of a man's sincerity 
is that he give himself for a principle. Words, 
money, all things else, are comparatively easy to 
give away ; but when a man makes a gift of his 
daily life and practice, it is plain that the truth, 
whatever it may be, has taken possession of him. 
Rousseau and the Sentimentalists. 

24. Queen Victoria, 1819. 

Under a wise, cultivated, and firm-handed mon- 
arch also, the national feeling of England grew rap- 
idly more homogeneous and intense, the rather as 
the womanhood of the sovereign stimulated a more 
chivalric loyalty, — while the new religion, of which 
she was the defender, helped to make England 
morally, as it was geographically, insular to the 
continent of Europe. Shakespeare Once More. 

25. B. W. Emerson, 1803. 
Search for his eloquence in his books and you will 
perchance miss it, but meanwhile you will find that 
it has kindled all your thoughts. 

Emerson the Lecturer. 

26. Joseph S. Buckminster, 1784. 
Without earnest convictions, no great or sound 
literature is conceivable. Dryden. 



MAY 27-29 

27. Dante, 1265. 
The secret of Dante's power is not far to seek. 
Whoever can express himself with the full force of 
unconscious sincerity will be found to have uttered 
something ideal and universal. Dante. 

In what I think to be the sublimest reach to 
which poetry has risen, the conclusion of the 
" Paradiso," Dante tell us that within the three 
whirling rings of vari-colored light that symbolize 
the wisdom, the power, and the love of God, he 
seems to see the image of man. 

Address as President op the Wordsworth Society. 

28. Louis Agassiz, 1807. 

His magic was not far to seek, — 
He was so human ! whether strong or weak, 
Far from his kind he neither sank nor soared, 
But sate an equal guest at every board : 
No beggar ever felt him condescend, 
Nor prince presume ; for still himself he bare 
At manhood's simple level, and where'er 
He met a stranger, there he left a friend. 

Agassiz. 

29. Patrick Henry, 1736. 

All great poets have their message to deliver us 
from something higher than they. Dante. 



MAY 30-JUNE 2 

30. Decoration Day. 
Many loved Truth, and lavished life's best oil 

Amid the dust of books to find her, 
Content at last, for guerdon of their toil, 

With the cast mantle she hath left behind her. 
Many in sad faith sought for her, 
Many with crossed hands sighed for her ; 
But these, our brothers, fought for her, 
At life's dear peril wrought for her, 
So loved her that they died for her. 

Harvard Commemoration Ode. 

31. John A. Andrew, 1818. 
What a day 
To sun me and do nothing ! Nay, I think 
Merely to bask and ripen is sometimes 
The student's wiser business. 

Under the Willows. 

JUNE 

1. Prince Imperial killed, 1879. 
Away, unfruitful love of books, 
For whose vain idiom we reject 
The soul's more native dialect. al Fresco. 
2. John G. Saxe, 1816. 
For remember that there is nothing less profit- 
able than scholarship for the mere sake of scholar- 
ship, nor anything more wearisome in the attain- 
ment. Books and Libraries. 



JUNE 3-5 

3. Sydney Smith, 1771. 
Heaven's cup held down to me I drain, 
The sunshine mounts and spurs my brain ; 
Bathing in grass, with thirsty eye 
I suck the last drop of the sky ; 
With each hot sense I draw to the lees 
The quickening out-door influences, 
And empty to each radiant coiner 
A supernaculum of summer. Eurydice, 

4. Lord Wolseley, 1833. 
June's bridesman, poet o' the year, 
Gladness on wings, the bobolink, is here ; 
Half-hid in tip-top apple-blooms he swings, 
Or climbs aginst the breeze with quiverin' wings, 
Or, givin' way to 't in a mock despair, 
Runs down, a brook o' laughter, thru the air. 

Sunthin' in the Pastoral Line. 

5. Counts Egmont and Horn beheaded, 1568. 
There is something inexpressibly dear to me in 
these old friendships of a lifetime. ... I love to 
bring these aborigines back to the mansuetude they 
showed to the early voyagers, and before (forgive 
the involuntary pun) they had grown accustomed 
to man and knew his savage ways. And they re- 
pay your kindness with a sweet familiarity too deli- 
cate ever to breed contempt. 

My Garden Acquaintance. 



JUNE 6-9 

6. Corneille, 1606. 
Nor th' airth don't git put out with me, 

Thet love her 'z though she wuz a woman ; 
Why, th ? a'n't a bird upon the tree 
But half forgives my bein' human. 

Mr. Hosea Biglow to the Editor. 

7. The Field of the Cloth of Gold, 1520. 
The crows flapped over by twos and threes, 
In the pool drowsed the cattle up to their knees, 
The little birds sang as if it were 
The one day of summer in all the year, 
And the very leaves seemed to sing on the trees. 
Thb Vision of Sir Launfal. 

8. Charles Eeade, 1814. 
Summer on field and hill, in heart and brain, 
All life washed clean in this high tide of June. 

Under the Willows. 

9. Charles Dickens died, 1870. 
What is the reason that all children are geniuses, 
(though they contrive so soon to outgrow that dan- 
gerous quality,) except that they never cross-exam- 
ine themselves on the subject ? The moment that 
process begins, their speech loses its gift of unex- 
pectedness, and they become as tediously imperti- 
nent as the rest of us. 

Rousseau and the Sentimentalists. 



JUNE 10-13 

10. Francis L. Hawks, 1798. 
Not only around our infancy 
Doth heaven with all its splendors lie ; 
Daily, with souls that cringe and plot, 
We Sinais climb and know it not. 

The Vision op Sik Launfal. 

11. Ben Jonson, 1574. 

Hushed with broad sunlight lies the hill, 
And, minuting the long day's loss, 
The cedar's shadow, slow and still, 
Creeps o'er its dial of gray moss. 

Warm noon brims full the valley's cup, 

The aspen's leaves are scarce astir ; 

Only the little mill sends up 

Its busy, never-ceasing burr. Beaver Brook. 

12. Charles Kingsley, 1819. 
O Faith ! if thou art strong, thine opposite 
Is mighty also, and the dull fool's sneer 
Hath ofttimes shot chill palsy through the arm 
Just lifted to achieve its crowning deed. 

Columbus. 

13. Thomas Arnold, 1795. 
Children are God's apostles, day by day 
Sent forth to preach of love, and hope, and peace. 
On the Death op a Friend's Child. 



JUNE 14-16 

14. Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1811. 
Yes, a great heart is hers, one that dares to go in 
To the prison, the slave-hut, the alleys of sin, 
And to bring into each, or to find there some line, 
Of the never completely out-trampled divine. 

A Fable for Critics. 

15. Magna Charta signed, 1215. 
The world of the imagination is not the world of 
abstraction and nonentity, as some conceive, but a 
world formed out of chaos by a sense of the beauty 
that is in man and the earth on which he dwells. 
It is the realm of Might-be, our haven of refuge 
from the shortcomings and disillusions of life. . . . 
Do we believe, then, that God gave us in mockery 
this splendid faculty of sympathy with things that 
are a joy forever ? For my part, I believe that 
the love and study of works of imagination is of 
practical utility in a country so profoundly material 
(or, as we like to call it, practical) in its leading 
tendencies as ours. Books and Libraries. 

16. Judah Touro, 1775. 
Who speaks the truth stabs Falsehood to the heart, 
And his mere word makes despots tremble more 
Than ever Brutus with his dagger could. l'Envoi. 



JUNE 17-19 

17. Bunker Hill, 1775. 
Experience is a dumb, dead thing, 
The victory 's in believing. To - 



18. Waterloo, 1815. 
Trust me, 't is something to be cast 
Face to face with one's Self at last, 
To be taken out of the fuss and strife, 
The endless clatter of plate and knife, 
The bore of books and the bores of the street, 
From the singular mess we agree to call Life, 
Where that is best which the most fools vote is, 
And to be set down on one's own two feet 
So nigh to the great warm heart of God, 
You almost seem to feel it beat. 

Pictures from Appledore. 

19. Pascal, 1623. 

All birds during the pairing season become more 
or less sentimental, and murmur soft nothings in a 
tone very unlike the grinding-organ repetition and 
loudness of their habitual song. The crow is very 
comical as a lover, and to hear him trying to soften 
his croak to the proper Saint Preux standard has 
something the effect of a Mississippi boatman quot- 
ing Tennyson. Yet there are few things to my ear 
more melodious than his caw of a clear winter morn- 
ing, as it drops to you filtered through five hundred 
fathoms of crisp blue air. My Garden Acquaintance. 



JUNE 20-23 

20. Accession of Queen Victoria, 1837. 
Frank-hearted hostess of the field and wood, 
Gypsy, whose roof is every spreading tree, 
June is the pearl of our New England year. 
Still a surprisal, though expected long, 
Her coming startles. Long she lies in wait, 
Makes many a feint, peeps forth, draws coyly back, 
Then, from some southern ambush in the sky, 
With one great gush of blossom storms the world. 

Under the Willows. 

21. Earl of Dufferin, 1826. 
If poems die, it is because there was never true 
life in them, that is, that true poetic vitality which 
no depth of thought, no airiness of fancy, no sincer- 
ity of feeling, can singly communicate, but which 
leaps throbbing at touch of that shaping faculty, the 
imagination. Spenser. 

22. Thomas Day, 1748. 
It is not a great Xerxes army of words, but a 
compact Greek ten thousand, that march safely 
down to posterity. Wordsworth. 

23. Midsummer Eve. 
Pan leaps and pipes all summer long, 

The fairies dance each full-mooned night, 
Would we but doff our lenses strong, 
And trust our wiser eyes' delight. 

The Foot-Path. 



JUNE 24-27 

24. St. John Baptist. 
Too many noble souls have thought and died, 

Too many mighty poets lived and sung, 
And our good Saxon, from lips purified 

With martyr fire, throughout the world hath rung 
Too long to have God's holy cause denied. 

Sonnet VI. 

25. Lucius Manlius Sargent, 1786. 
I care not how men trace their ancestry, 
To ape or Adam ; let them please their whim ; 
But I in June am midway to believe 
A tree among my far progenitors, 
Such sympathy is mine with all the race. 

Under the Willows. 

26. Philip Doddridge, 1702. 
Opinions are " as handy," to borrow our Yankee 
proverb, " as a pocket in a shirt," and, I may add, 
as hard to come at. Harvard Anniversary Address. 

27. Sir William Pepper ell, 1696. 
The greatest poets, I think, have found man 
more interesting than nature, have considered na- 
ture as no more than the necessary scenery, artisti- 
cally harmful if too pompous or obtrusive, before 
which man acts his tragi-comedy of life. 

Address as President of the Wordsworth Society. 



JUNE 28-30 

28. J. J. Rousseau, 1712. 
" Do right though the heavens fall " is an ad- 
mirable precept so long as the heavens do not take 
you at your word and come down about your 
ears — still worse about those of your neighbors. , 
It is a rule rather of private than public obliga- 
tion — for indeed it is the doing of right that keeps 
the heavens from falling. Don Quixote. 

29. St. Peter. 
What men call luck 
Is the prerogative of valiant souls, 
The fealty life pays its rightful kings. 

A Glance Behind the Curtain. 

30. Leopardi, 1798. 
The robin has a bad reputation among people who 
do not value themselves less for being fond of cher- 
ries. There is, I admit, a spice of vulgarity in him, 
and his song is rather of the Bloomfield sort, too 
largely ballasted with prose. . . . But for a' that 
and twice as muckle 's a J that, I would not exchange 
him for all the cherries that ever came out of Asia 
Minor. With whatever faults, he has not wholly 
forfeited that superiority which belongs to the chil- 
dren of nature. My Garden Acquaintance. 



JULY 1-3 

1. First Bay of Gettysburg, 1863. 
And for associations, if one have not the wit to 
make them for himself out of his native earth, no 
ready-made ones of other men will avail him much. 
Lexington is none the worse to me for not being in 
Greece, nor Gettysburg that its name is not Mara- 
thon. On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners. 

2. C. W. von Gluck, 1714. 
Like to a mighty heart the music seemed, 

That yearns with melodies it cannot speak, 
Until, in grand despair of what it dreamed, 

In the agony of effort it doth break, 
Yet triumphs breaking ; on it rushed and streamed 

And wantoned in its might, as when a lake, 
Long pent among the mountains, bursts its walls 
And in one crowding gush leaps forth and falls. 

A Legend of Brittany. 

3. Josiak Quincy died, 1864. 

We are glad to have the biography of one who, 
beginning as a gentleman, kept himself such to the 
end, — who, with no necessity of labor, left behind 
him an amount of thoroughly done work such as few 
have accomplished with the mighty help of hunger. 
Some kind of pace may be got out of the veriest 
jade by the near prospect of oats ; but the thorough- 
bred has the spur in his blood. 

A Great Public Character. 



JULY 4-7 

4. Independence Day ; N. Hawthorne, 1804. 
We, who believe Life's bases rest 
Beyond the probe of chemic test, 
Still like our fathers, feel Thee near, 
Sure that, while lasts the immutable decree, 
The land to Human Nature dear 
Shall not be unbeloved of Thee. 

An Ode for the Fourth of July. 

New England's poet, soul reserved and deep, 
November nature with a name of May. Agassiz. 

5. D. G. Farragut, 1801. 
^he power of diffusion without being diffuse 
..-ould seem to be the highest merit of narration, 
giving it that easy flow which is so delightful. 

Chaucer. 

6. John Huss, 1373. 
All thoughts that mould the age begin 
Deep down within the primitive soul, 
And from the many slowly upward win 
To one who grasps the whole. 

An Incident in a Railroad Car. 

7. Sheridan died, 1816. 
Nex' thing to knowin' you 're well off is nut to 
know when y' ain't. 

BlRDOFREDUM SAWIN, ESQ., TO Mr. HOSEA BlGLOW. 






JULY 8-1 1 

8. Fitz-Greene Halleck, 1790. 

God's love and man's are of the selfsame blood. 

And He can see that always at the door 
Of foulest hearts the angel-nature yet 
Knocks to return and cancel all its debt. 

A Legend of Brittany. 

9. Henry Hallam, 1777. 

.The other day (5th July) I marked 98° in the 
shade, my high-water mark, higher by one degree 
than I had ever seen it before. I happened to meet 
a neighbor ; as we mopped our brows at each other, 
he told me that he had just cleared 100°, and I 
went home a beaten man. I had not felt the heat 
before, save as a beautiful exaggeration of sunshine , 
but now it oppressed me with the prosaic vulgarity 
r of an oven. My Garden Acquaintance. 

10. John Calvin, 1509. 

The most winsome and wayward of brooks draws 
now and then some lover's foot to its intimate re- 
serve, while the spirt of a bursting water-pipe 
gathers a gaping crowd forthwith. Carlyle. 

11. John Quincy Adams, 1767. 
There is something delightfully absurd in six 
volumes addressed to a world of such " vulgar fel- 
lows " as Thoreau affirmed his fellow-men to be. 

Thoreau. 



JULY 12-14 

12. H. B. Thoreau, 1817. 
He had watched Nature like a detective who is to 
go upon the stand ; as we read him, it seems as if 
all-out-of-doors had kept a diary and become its own 
Montaigne ; we look at the landscape as in a Claude 
Lorraine glass ; compared with his, all other books 
of similar aim, even White's " Selborne," seem dry 
as a country clergyman's meteorological journal in 
an old almanac. Thoreau. 

13. Ordinance of 1787 2^°^ssed. 

All free governments, whatever their name, are 
^eality governments by public opinion, and it is 
' .ne quality of this public opinion that their pros- 
perity depends. It is, therefore, their first duty to 
purify the element from which they draw the breath 
oi life. Democracy. 

14. Jane Welsh Carlyle, 1801. 

No man, I suspect, ever lived long in the country 
without being bitten by these meteorological ambi- 
tions. He likes to be hotter and colder, to have 
been more deeply snowed up, to have more trees 
and larger blown down than his neighbors. With 
us descendants of the Puritans especially, these 
weather-competitions supply the abnegated excite- 
ment of the race-course. My Garden Acquaintance. 



JULY 15-18 

15. Cardinal Manning, 1808, 
The longer on this earth we live 
And weigh the various qualities of men, 
Seeing %ow most are fugitive, 
Or fitful gifts, at best, of now and then, 
Wind-wavered corpse-lights, daughters of the fen, 
The more we feel the high stern- featured beauty 
Of plain devotedness to duty, 
Steadfast and still, nor paid with mortal praise, 
But finding amplest recompense 
For life's ungarlanded expense 
In work done squarely and unwasted days. 

Under the Old Elm. 

16. Sir Joshua Beynolds, 1723. 

They have half-way conquered Fate 
Who go half-way to meet her. 

A Glance Behind the Curtain. 

17. Isaac Watts, 1674. 

From the days of the first grandfather, everybody 
has remembered a golden age behind them ! 

Carlyle. 
18. W. M. Thackeray, 1811. 

The quiet unconcern with which he [Chaucer] 
says his best things is peculiar to him among Eng- 
lish poets, though Goldsmith, Addison, and Thack- 
eray have approached it in prose. Chaucer. 



JULY 19-21 

19. Alexander Dallas Bache, 1806. 
Wonderful, to him that has eyes to see it rightly, 
is the newspaper. To me, for example, sitting on 
the critical front bench of the pit, in my study here 
in Jaalam, the advent of my weekly journal is as 
that of a strolling theatre, or rather of a puppet- 
show, on whose stage, narrow as it is, the tragedy, 
comedy, and farce of life are played in little. Be- 
hold the whole huge earth sent to me hebdomadally 
in a brown paper wrapper ! 

Sermon op the Rev. Homer Wilbur. 

20. John Sterling, 1806. 

For the individual man there is no radical cure, 
outside of human nature itself, for the evils to which 
human nature is heir. The rule will always hold 
good that you must 

Be your own palace or the world 's your gaol. 
But for artificial evils, for evils that spring from 
want of thought, thought must find a remedy some- 
where. Democracy. 
21. Battle of Bull Bun, 1861. 

Our civil war, by the breadth of its proportions 
and the implacability of its demands, forced us to 
admit a truer valuation, and gave us, in our own 
despite, great soldiers and sailors, allowed for such 
by all the world. A Great Public Character. 



JULY 22-24 

22. Garibaldi, 1807. 
I am one of those who believe that the real will 
never find an irremovable basis till it rests on the 
ideal. Democracy. 

23. U. S. Grant died, 1885. 

The one touch of nature that makes the whole 
world kin is a touch of heroism, our sympathy with 
which dignifies and ennobles. Garfield. 

24. Simon Bolivar, 1783. 
'T were glorious, no doubt, to be 
One of the strong-winged Hierarchy, 
To burn with Seraphs, or to shine 
With Cherubs, deathlessly divine ; 
Yet I, perhaps, poor earthly clod, 
Could I forget myself in God, 
Could I but find my nature's clew 
Simply as birds and blossoms do, 
And but for one rapt moment know 
'T is Heaven must come, not we must go, 
Should win my place as near the throne 
As the pearl-angel of its zone, 
And God would listen 'mid the throng 
For my one breath of perfect song, 
That, in its simple human way, 
Said all the Host of Heaven could say. 

What Raebi Jehosha Said. 



JULY 25-28 

25. St. James. 

Once to every man and nation comes the moment to 

decide, 
In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good 

or evil side ; 
Some great cause, God's new Messiah, offering each 

the bloom or blight, 
Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep 

upon the right. The Present Crisis. 

26. Wintkrojj Mackworth Praed, 1802. 
There is only one thing better than tradition, and 
that is the original and eternal life out of which all 
tradition takes its rise. Thoreau. 

27. Thomas Campbell, 1777. 

Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society 
is wholesome for the character. Dryden. 

28. Revolution of July ', 1830. 

There is a great deal more than is commonly sup- 
posed in this choice of words. Men's thoughts and 
opinions are in a great degree vassals of him who 
invents a new phrase or reapplies an old epithet. 
The thought or feeling a thousand times repeated 
becomes his at last who utters it best. Keats. 



JULY 29-31 

29. Alexis de Tocqueville, 1805, 
Man is more than Constitutions ; better rot beneath 

the sod, 
Than be true to Church and State, while we are 
doubly false to God ! 
On the Capture of Fugitive Slaves near Washington. 

30. Samuel Rogers, 1763. 

We have picked nearly every apple (wormy or 
otherwise) from the world's tree of knowledge, and 
that without an Eve to tempt us. Two or three 
have hitherto hung luckily beyond reach on a lofty 
bough shadowing the interior of Africa, but there is 
a German Doctor at this very moment pelting at 
them with sticks and stones. At Sea. 

31. John Ericsson, 1803. 

We are comforted by being told that ... we are 
only complying with what is called the Spirit of the 
Age, which may be, after all, only a finer name for 
the mischievous goblin known to our forefathers as 
Puck. I have seen several Spirits of the Age in 
my time, of very different voices and summoning in 
very different directions, but unanimous in their pro- 
pensity to land us in the mire at last. 

Harvard Anniversary Address. 



AUGUST 1-4 

1. Lammas. 

The hope of Truth grows stronger, day by day ; 
I hear the soul of Man around me waking, 
Like a great sea, its frozen fetters breaking, 
And flinging up to heaven its sunlit spray, 
Tossing huge continents in scornful play, 
And crushing them with din of grinding thunder, 
That makes old emptinesses stare in wonder. 

Sub Pondere Crescit. 

2. Edward A. Freeman, 1823. 

Poets have sung all manner of vegetable loves ; 

Petrarch has celebrated the laurel, Chaucer the 

daisy, and Wordsworth the gallows tree. 

Carlyle. 

3. Juliana Horatia Ewing, 1841. 
The capacity of indignation makes an essential 
part of the outfit of every honest man, but I am in- 
clined to doubt whether he is a wise one who allows 
himself to act upon its first hints. It should be 
rather, I suspect, a latent heat in the blood, which 
makes itself felt in character. 

On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners. 

4. Shelley, 1792. 
Eyes are not so common as people think, or poets 
Would be plentier. A Good Word for Winter. 



AUGUST 5-8 

5. First telegraphic message across the Atlantic, 1858. 

Letters have sympathies 
And tell-tale faces .... 
But now Fate stuns as with a mace ; 
The savage from the skies that men have caught 
And some scant use of language taught, 

Tells only what he must, — 
The steel cold fact in one laconic thrust. 

Agassiz. 

6. Lord Tennyson, 1809. 
The dainty trick of Tennyson cloys when caught 
by a whole generation of versifiers, as the style of a 
great poet never can be. Swinburne's Tragedies. 

7. Joseph Rodman Drake, 1795. 
Truth is quite beyond the reach of satire. There 
is so brave a simplicity in her, that she can no more 
be made ridiculous than an oak or a pine. 

Letter of the Rev. Homer Wilbur. 

8. Defeat of Spanish Armada, 1588. 
The code of society is stronger with most persons 
than that of Sinai, and many a man who would not 
scruple to thrust his fingers in his neighbor's pocket 
would forego green peas rather than use his knife 
as a shovel. Pope. 



AUGUST 9-11 

9. John Dryden, 1631. 
English blood, made up of the best drops from 
the veins of many conquering, organizing, and col- 
onizing races, is a blood to be proud of, and most 
plainly vindicates its claim to dominion when it 
recognizes kinship through sympathy with what is 
simple, steadfast, and religious in character. When 
we learn to respect each other for the good qualities 
in each, we are helping to produce and foster them. 

Garfield. 

10. Sir Charles James Napier, 1782. 
Why, law an' order, honor, civil right, 
Ef they ainH wuth it, wut is wuth a fight ? 
I 'm older 'n you : the plough, the axe, the mill, 
All kin's o' labor an' all kin's o' skill, 
Would be a rabbit in a wild-cat's claw, 
Ef 't warn't for thet slow critter, 'stablished law ; 
Onsettle thet, an' all the world goes whiz, 
A screw 's gut loose in everythin' there is : 

Mason and Slidell : A Yankee Idyll. 

11. Jeffries Wyman, 1814. 
Let us be of good cheer, however, remembering 
that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which 
never come. Democracy. 



AUGUST 12-14 

12. Robert Southey, 1774. 
There never yet was flower fair in vain, 
Let classic poets rhyme it as they will ; 
The seasons toil that it may blow again, 
And summer's heart doth feel its every ill ; 
Nor is a true soul ever born for naught. 

Sonnet XI. 

13. Battle of Blenheim, 1704. 

I love to Titer there while night grows still, 

An' in the twinklin' villages about, , 

Fust here, then there, the well-saved lights goes 

out, 
An' nary sound but watch-dogs' false alarms, 
Or muffled cock-crows from the drowsy farms, 
Where some wise rooster (men act jest thet way) 
Stands to 't thet moon-rise is the break o' day : 
(So Mister Seward sticks a three-months' pin 
Where the war 'd oughto eend, then tries agin ; 
My gran'ther's rule was safer 'n 't is to crow : 
Don't never prophesy — onless ye know,) 

Mason and Slidell : A Yankee Idyll. 

14. Park Benjamin, 1809. 
I suppose Nature made the donkey half abstract- 
edly, while she was feeling her way up to her ideal 
in the horse, and that his bray is in like manner an 
experimental sketch for the neigh of her finished 
animal. Italy. 



AUGUST 15-18 

15. Napoleon Bonaparte, 1769 ; Walter Scott, 1771. 

I can conceive of no healthier reading for a boy, 
or girl either, than Scott's novels, or Cooper's, to 
speak only of the dead. I have found them very 
good reading at least for one young man, for one 
middle-aged man, and for one who is growing old. 
No, no — banish the Antiquary, banish Leather 
Stocking, and banish all the world ! Let us not go 
about to make life duller than it is. 

Books and Libraries. 

The poet's lyre demands 
An arm of tougher sinew than the sword. 

A Glance Behind the Curtain. 

16. James Walker, 1794. 
We hear it said sometimes that this is an age of 
transition, as if that made matters clearer ; but can 
any one point us to an age that was not ? If he 
could, he would show us an age of stagnation. 

Democracy. 

17. Fredrika Bremer, 1801. 
'T is heaven alone that is given away, 
'Tis only God may be had for the asking. 

The Vision of Sir Launpal. 

18. T. W. Parsons, 1819. 
Use can make sweet the peach's shady side, 
That only by reflection tastes of sun. 

The Cathedral. 



AUGUST 19-21 

19. Beranger, 1780. 
Yet for a moment I was snatched away 
And had the evidence of things not seen ; 
For one rapt moment ; then it all came back, 
This age that blots out life with question-marks, 
This nineteenth century with its knife and glass. 

The Cathedral. 

20. Bobert Herrick, 1591. 

We have at last got over the superstition that 
shepherds and shepherdesses are any wiser or sim- 
pler than other people. Spenser. 

Truth, after all, wears a different face to every- 
body, and it would be too tedious to wait till all 
were agreed. She is said to lie at the bottom of a 
well, for the very reason, perhaps, that whoever 
looks down in search of her sees his own image at 
the bottom, and is persuaded not only that he has 
seen the goddess, but that she is far better- looking 
than he had imagined. Democracy. 

21. John Tyndall, 1820. 

True Power was never born of brutish Strength. 

Prometheus. 



AUGUST 22-25 

22. Battle of Bosworth Field, 1485. 
Three-story larnin' 's pop'lar now ; I guess 
We thriv' ez wal on jes' two stories less, 
For it strikes me ther' 's sech a thing ez sinnin' 
By overloadin' children's underpinnin'. 

Sunthin' in the Pastoral Line. 

23. Cuvier, 1769. 
We learned once for all that compromise makes 
a good umbrella but a poor roof. Democracy. 

24. William Wilberforce, 1759. 
Life is continually weighing us in very sensitive 
scales, and telling every one of us precisely what 
his real weight is to the last grain of dust. Who- 
ever at fifty does not rate himself quite as low as 
most of his acquaintance would be likely to put him, 
must be either a fool or a great man. 

On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners. 

25. Bret Harte, 1839. 
I believe that in all really great imaginative work 
we are aware, as in nature, of something far more 
deeply interfused with our consciousness, underly- 
ing the obvious and familiar, as the living spirit of 
them, and accessible only to a heightened sense and 
a more passionate sympathy. Don Quixote. 



AUGUST 26-28 

26. Prince Albert, 1819. 
No Godlike thing knows aught of less and less, 
But widens to the boundless Perfectness. 

Sonnet 17. 

27. Titian died, 1576. 
As in the old fairy-tales, the task which the age 
imposes on its poet is to weave its straw into a 
golden tissue ; and when every device has failed, 
in conies the witch Imagination, and with a touch 
the miracle is achieved, simple as miracles always 
are after they are wrought. Spenser. 

28. Goethe, 1749. 
The figure of Goethe is grand, it is rightfully pre- 
eminent, it has something of the calm, and some- 
thing of the coldness, of the immortals : but the 
Valhalla of German letters can show one form, in 

its simple manhood, statelier even than his. 

Lessing. 

Goethe taught the self-culture that results in 
self-possession, in breadth and impartiality of view, 
and in equipoise of mind ; Wordsworth inculcated 
that self-development through intercourse with man 
and nature which leads to self-sufficingness, self- 
sustainment, and equilibrium of character. 

Address as President of the Wordsworth Society. 



AUGUST 29-SEPTEMBER 1 

29. O. W. Holmes, 1809. 
Holmes's rockets curve their long ellipse, 

And burst in seeds of fire that burst again 

To drop in scintillating rain. Agassiz. 

30. Joseph Dennie, 1768. 

There are two kinds of genius. The first and 
highest may be said to speak out of the eternal to 
the present, and must compel its age to understand 
it. The second understands its age, and tells it 
what it wishes to be told. Let us find strength 
and inspiration in the one, — amusement and in- 
struction in the other, and be honestly thankful for 
both. Pope. 

31. John Bunyan died, 1688. 

He 's true to God who 's true to man ; wherever 
wrong is done, 

To the humblest and the weakest, 'neath the all be- 
holding sun, 

That wrong is also done to us. 

On the Capture of Certain Fugitive Slaves. 

SEPTEMBER 

1. Battle of Sedan, 1870. 
Great wars come and great wars go, 
Wolf-tracks light on polar snow ; 
We shall see him come and gone, 
This second-hand Napoleon. 

Villa Franca, 1859. 



SEPTEMBER 2-5 

2. John Howard, 1726. 

For Wisdom is meek sorrow's patient child, 
And empire over self, and all the deep 
Strong charities that make men seem like gods ; 
And love, that makes them be gods, from her 

breasts 
Sucks in the milk that makes mankind one blood. 

Prometheus. 

3. Oliver Cromwell died, 1658. 
We were designed in the cradle, perhaps earlier, 
and it is in finding out this design, and shaping our- 
selves to it, that our years are spent wisely. It is 
the vain endeavor to make ourselves what we are 
not that has strewn history with so many broken 
purposes and lives left in the rough. Keats. 

4. Phoebe Gary, 1824. 
Whatever the ratio of population, the average 
amount of human nature to the square mile is the 
same the world over. A Moosehead Journal. 

5. Richelieu, 1585. 
Time Was unlocks the riddle of Time Is, 
That offers choice of glory or of gloom ; 
The solver makes Time Shall Be surely his. 

The Washers of the Shroud 



SEPTEMBER 6-8 

6. Lafayette, 1757. 
What was that sigh which seemed so near, 
Chilling your fancy to the core ? 
'T is only the sad old sea you hear, 
That seems to seek forevermore 
Something it cannot find, and so, 
Sighing, seeks on, and tells its woe 
To the pitiless breakers of Appledore. 

Pictures from Appledore. 

7. Queen Elizabeth, 1533. 

I know one person who is singular enough to 
think Cambridge the very best spot on the habit- 
able globe. " Doubtless God could have made a 
better, but doubtless he never did." 

On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners. 

8. Ariosto, 1474. 

I 'm older 'n you, an' I 've seen things an' men, 

An' my experunce — tell ye wut it 's ben. 

Folks thet worked thorough was the ones thet thriv, 

But bad work f oilers ye ez long 's ye live ; 

You can't git red on't : jest ez sure ez sin, 

It 's oilers askin' to be done agin. 

Wal, don't give up afore the ship goes down : 
It 's a stiff gale, but Providence wun't drown ; 

Mason and Slidell : A Yankee Idyll. 



SEPTEMBER 9-12 

9. Battle of Flodden, 1513. 
Every man is conscious that he leads two lives, — 
. . . one which he carries to society and the dinner- 
table, the other in which his youth and aspiration 
survive for him, and which is a confidence between 
himself and God. Both may be equally sincere, 
and there need be no contradiction between them. 
Rousseau and the Sentimentalists. 

10. Mungo Park, 1771. 
God is the only being who has time enough ; but 
a prudent man, who knows how to seize occasion, 
can commonly make a shift to find as much as he 
needs. Abraham Lincoln. 

11. James Thomson, 1700. 

New faculties stretch out to meet new wants. 

The Pioneers. 

12. Charles Dudley Warner, 1829. 
Autumn is the poet of the family. He gets you 
up a splendor that you would say was made out of 
real sunset ; but it is nothing more than a few 
hectic leaves when all is done. He is but a senti- 
mentalist after all ; a kind of Lamartine whining 
along the ancestral avenues he has made bare tim- 
ber ot. A Good Word for Winter. 



SEPTEMBER 13-15 

13. James Shirley, 1596. 
The only faith that wears well and holds its 
color in all weathers is that which is woven of con- 
viction. Abraham Lincoln. 

14. Humboldt, 1769. 
The Mysterious bounds nothing now on the North, 
South, East, or West. We have played Jack 
Horner with our earth, till there is never a plum 
left in it. At Sea. 

15. James Fenimore Cooper, 1789. 
There is one thing in Cooper I like, too, and 

that is 
That on manners he lectures his countrymen gratis; 
Not precisely so either, because, for a rarity, 
He is paid for his tickets in unpopularity. 
Now he may overcharge his American pictures, 
But you '11 grant there 's a good deal of truth in his 

strictures ; 
And I honor the man who is willing to sink 
Half his present repute for the freedom to think, 
And, when he has thought, be his cause strong or 

weak, 
Will risk t' other half for the freedom to speak, 
Caring naught for what vengeance the mob has in 

store, 
Let that mob be the upper ten thousand or lower. 

A Fable for Critics. 



SEPTEMBER 16-18 

16. Francis Parkman, 1823. 
Men think it is an awful sight 

To see a soul just set adrift 
On that drear voyage from whose night 

The ominous shadows never lift ; 
But 't is more awful to behold 

A helpless infant newly born, 
Whose little hands unconscious, hold 

The keys of darkness and of morn. 

Exteeme Unction. 

17. Settlement of Boston, 1630. 
Both by its history and position, the town had 
what the French call a solidarity, an almost per- 
sonal consciousness, rare anywhere, rare especially 
in America. A Great Public Character. 

18. Samuel Johnson, 1709. 
Johnson neither in amplitude of literature nor 
exactness of scholarship could be deemed a match 
for Lessing ; but they were alike in the power 
of readily applying whatever they had learned, 
whether for purposes of illustration or argument. 
They resemble each other, also, in a kind of ab- 
solute common-sense, and in the force with which 
they could plant a direct blow with the whole 
weight both of their training and their temperament 
behind it. Lessing. 



SEPTEMBER 19-22 

19. Garfield died, 1881. 

That death-scene was more than singular ; it 
was unexampled. The whole civilized world was 
gathered about it in the breathless suspense of anx- 
ious solicitude, listened to the difficult breathing, 
counted the fluttering pulse, was cheered by the 
momentary rally and saddened by the inevitable 
relapse. And let us thank God and take courage 
when we reflect that it was through the manliness, 
the patience, the religious fortitude of the splendid 
victim that the tie of human brotherhood was 
thrilled to a consciousness of its sacred function. 

Garfield. 

20. Lord Falkland hilled, 1643. 
Why make me moan 
For loss that doth enrich us yet 
With upward yearnings of regret ? 

Memorise Positum. 

21. St. Matthew. 
God sends his teachers unto every age, 
To every clime, and every race of men, 
With revelations fitted to their growth. 

Rhcecus. 

22. Theodore Winthrop, 1828. 

The nurse of full-grown souls is solitude. 

Columbus. 



SEPTEMBER 23-25 

23. Karl Theodore Korner, 1791. 

Science was Faith once ; Faith were Science now, 
Would she but lay her bow and arrows by, 
And arm her with the weapons of the time. 
Nothing that keeps thought out is safe from 

thought ; 
For there 's no virgin-fort but self-respect, 
And Truth defensive hath lost hold on God. 
Shall we treat Him as if He were a child 
That knew not His own purpose ? nor dare trust 
The Rock of Ages to their chemic tests, 
Lest some day the all-sustaining base divine 
Should fail from under us, dissolved in gas ? 

The Cathedral. 

24. Sharon Turner, 1768. 
It ever is weak falsehood's destiny 
That her thick mask turns crystal to let through 
The unsuspicious eyes of honesty. 

A Legend of Brittany. 

25. Felicia Hemans, 1794. 
How shimmer the low flats and pastures bare, 
As with her nectar Hebe Autumn fills, 
The bowl between me and those distant hills, 
And smiles and shakes abroad her misty, tremulous 
hair ! An Indian-Summer Reverie. 



SEPTEMBER 26-29 

26. James A. Hillhouse, 1789. 
The foolish and the dead alone never change their 
opinion. Abraham Lincoln. 

27. Samuel Adams, 1722. 
Solid success must be based on solid qualities 
and the honest culture of them. Carlyle. 

28. Prosper Merimee, 1803. 
Brain is always to be bought, but passion never 
comes to market. Italy. 

29. Michaelmas. 

Rabbi Jehosha used to say 
That God made angels every day, 
Perfect as Michael and the rest 
First brooded in creation's nest, 
Whose only office was to cry 
Hosanna ! once, and then to die ; 
Or rather, with Life's essence blent, 
To be led home from banishment. 
Rabbi Jehosha had the skill 
To know that Heaven is in God's will ; 
And doing that, though, for a space 
One heart-beat long, may win a grace 
As full of grandeur and of glow 
As Princes of the Chariot know. 

What Rabbi Jehosha Said. 



SEPTEMBER 30-OCTOBER 2 

30. Empress Augusta of Germany ', 1811. 
Far through the memory shines a happy day, 
Cloudless of care, down-shod to every sense, 
And simply perfect from its own resource, 
As to a bee the new campanula's 
Illuminate seclusion swung in air. 
Such days are not the prey of setting suns, 
Nor ever blurred, with mist of after-thought ; 
Like words made magical by poets dead, 
Wherein the music of all meaning is 
The sense hath garnered or the soul divined, 
They mingle with our life's ethereal part, 
Sweetening and gathering sweetness evermore, 
By beauty's franchise disenthralled of time. 

The Cathedral. 

OCTOBER 

1. Bufus Choate, 1799. 
Swords grave no name on the long-memoried rock 
But moss shall hide it. The Voyage to Vinland. 

2. W. E. Charming died, 1842. 
No power can die that ever wrought for Truth ; 

Thereby a law of Nature it became, 
And lives un withered in its sinewy youth, 
When he who called it forth is but a name. 

Elegy on the Death op Dr. Channing. 



OCTOBER 3-6 

3. George Bancroft, 1800. 
The rapidity with which the human mind levels 
itself to the standard around it gives us the most 
pertinent warning as to the company we keep. It 
is as hard for most characters to stay at their own 
average point in all companies as for a thermometer 
to say 65° for twenty-four hours together. 

A Moosehead Journal. 

4. Guizot, 1787. 
Much did he, and much well ; yet most of all 
I prized his skill in leisure and the ease 
Of a life flowing full without a plan ; 
For most are idly busy ; him I call 
Thrice fortunate who knew himself to please, 
Learned in those arts that make a gentleman. 

Bankside. 

5. Jonathan Edwards, 1703. 
Many a boy has hated, and rightly hated, Homer 
and Horace the pedagogues and grammarians, who 
would have loved Homer and Horace the poets, had 
he been allowed to make their acquaintance. 

Harvard Anniversary Address. 

6. Jenny Lind, 1821. 
If we cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, 
so neither can we hope to succeed with the opposite 
experiment. But we may spoil the silk for its legiti- 
mate uses. Books and Libraries. 



OCTOBER 7-10 

7. Edgar A. Toe died, 1849. 

God works for all. Ye cannot hem the hope of 

being free 
With parallels of latitude, with mountain-range or 

sea. The Capture. 

8. John Ray, 1839. 

I do not fear to follow out the truth, 
Albeit along the precipice's edge. 

A Glance Behind the Curtain. 

9. Cervantes, 1547. 

There is a moral in " Don Quixote," and a very 
profound one, whether Cervantes consciously put it 
there or not, and it is this : that whoever quarrels 
with the Nature of Things, wittingly or unwittingly, 
is certain to get the worst of it. The great diffi- 
culty lies in finding out what the Nature of Things 
really and perdurably is, and the great wisdom, 
after we have made this discovery, or persuaded 
ourselves that we have made it, is in accommodat- 
ing our lives and actions to it as best we may or 
can. Don Quixote. 

10. Robert Gould Shaw, 1837. 
The man who gives his life for a principle has 
done more for his kind than he who discovers a new 
metal or names a new gas, for the great motors of 
the race are moral, not intellectual. Dante. 



OCTOBER 1 1-13 

11. Samuel G. Brake, 1798. 
Friendless, on an unknown sea, 
Coping with mad waves and more mutinous spirits, 
Battled he with the dreadful ache at heart 
Which tempts, with devilish subtleties of doubt, 
The hermit of that loneliest solitude, 

The silent desert of a great New Thought. 

L'Envoi. 

12. Landing of Columbus, 1492. 

One poor day ! — 
Remember whose and not how short it is ! 
It is God's day, it is Columbus's. 
A lavish day ! One day, with life and heart, 
Is more than time enough to find a world. 

Columbus. 

Whatever can be known of earth we know, 

Sneered Europe's wise men, in their snail-shells 
curled ; 
No ! said one man in Genoa, and that No 
Out of the dark created this New World. 

To W. L. Garrison. 

13. Elizabeth Fry died, 1845. 
And they who sowed the light shall reap 
The golden sheaves of morning. 

An Interview with Miles Standish. 



OCTOBER 14-16 

14. William Penn, 1644. 
Every truth of morals must be redemonstrated 
in the experience of the individual man before he 
is capable of utilizing it as a constituent of charac- 
ter or a guide in action. A man does not receive 
the statements that "two and two make four," and 
that "the pure in heart shall see God," on the 
same terms. The one can be proved to him with 
four grains of corn ; he can never arrive at a belief 
in the other till he realize it in the intimate persua- 
sion of his whole being. This is typified in the 
mystery of the incarnation. Dante. 

15. Virgil, 70 B. C. 
Then, every morn, the river's banks shine bright 
With smooth plate-armor, treacherous and frail, 

By the frost's clinking hammers forged at night, 
'Gainst which the lancers of the sun prevail, 
Giving a pretty emblem of the day 
When guiltier arms in light shall melt away, 
And states shall move free-limbed, loosed from 
, war's cramping mail. 

An Indian-Summer Reverie. 

16. Albrecht von Haller, 1708. 
The riches of scholarship, the benignities of litera- 
ture defy fortune and outlive calamity. They are 
beyond the reach of thief or moth or rust. 

Books and Libraries. 



OCTOBER 17-20 

17. Sir John Bowring, 1792. 
Exact justice is commonly more merciful in the 
long run than pity, for it tends to foster in men 
those stronger qualities which make them good 
citizens. Dante. 

18. St Luke. 
The true historical genius, to our thinking, is 
that which can see the nobler meaning of events 
that are near him, as the true poet is he who de- 
tects the divine in the casual ; and we somewhat 
suspect the depth of his insight into the past, who 
cannot recognize the godlike of to-day under that 
disguise in which it always visits us. Carlyle. 

19. Sir Thomas Browne, 1605. 
Blessed the natures shored on every side 
With landmarks of hereditary thought ! 
Thrice happy they that wander not lifelong 
Beyond near succor of the household faith. 

The Cathedral. 

20. Thomas Hughes, 1823. 
Evil springs up, and flowers, and bears no seed, 
And feeds the green earth with its swift decay, 
Leaving it richer for the growth of truth ; 
But Good, once put in action or in thought, 
Like a strong oak, doth from its boughs shed down 
The ripe germs of a forest. Prometheus. 



OCTOBER 21-23 

21. Coleridge, 1772. 

We are here to-day not to consider what Cole- 
ridge owed to himself, to his family, or to the world, 
but what we owe to him. Let us at least not volun- 
teer to draw his frailties from their dread abode. 
. . . Whatever may have been his faults and 
weaknesses, he was the man of all his generation to 
whom we should most unhesitatingly allow the dis- 
tinction of genius, that is, of one authentically pos- 
sessed from time to time by some influence that 
made him better and greater than himself. 

Address on Unveiling the Bust of Coleridge. 

22. Thomas Arnold died, 1822. 

Even as the roots, shut in the darksome earth. 

Share in the tree-top's joyance, and conceive 

Of sunshine and wide air and winged things 

By sympathy of nature, so do I 

Have evidence of Thee so far above 

Yet in and of me ! The Cathedral. 

23. Francis Jeffrey, 1773. 
All around me every bush and tree 
Says Autumn *s here, and Winter soon will be, 
Who snows his soft, white sleep and silence over 
all. An Indian-Summer Reverie. 



OCTOBER 24-27 

24. Sir James Mackintosh, 1765. 
The first lesson in reading well is that which 
teaches us to distinguish between literature and 
merely printed matter. The choice lies wholly with 
ourselves. We have the key put into our hands ; 
shall we unlock the pantry or the oratory ? 

Books and Libraries. 

25. Chaucer died, 1400. 
Who is it needs such flawless shafts as Fate ? 
What archer of his arrows is so choice, 
Or hits the white so surely ? They are men, 
The chosen of her quiver ; nor for her 
Will every reed suffice, or cross-grained stick 
At random from life's vulgar fagot plucked : 
Such answer household ends ; but she will have 
Souls straight and clear, of toughest fibre, sound 
Down to the heart of hearts, the Voyage to Vinland. 

26. Count von Moltke, 1800. 
The man of talents possesses them like so many 
tools, does his job with them, and there an end ; but 
the man of genius is possessed by it, and it makes 
him into a book or a life according to its whim. 

Cambridge Thirty Years Ago. 

27. Lord Ashburton, 1774. 
No man can jump off his own shadow, 
Nor, for that matter, off his own age. Spenser. 



OCTOBER 28-31 

28. Erasmus, 1467. 
Fear nothing, and hope all things, as the Eight 
Alone may do securely ; every hour 
The thrones of Ignorance and ancient Night 
Lose somewhat of their long-usurped power, 
And Freedom's lightest word can make them shiver 
With a base dread that clings to them forever. 

TO J. R. GlDDINGS. 

29. John Keats, 1795. 
Yes ! the few words which, like great thunder- 
drops, 
Thy large heart down to earth shook doubtfully, 
Thrilled by the inward lightning of its might, 
Serene and pure, like gushing joy of light, 
Shall track the eternal chords of Destiny, 
After the moon-led pulse of ocean stops. 

To the Spirit op Keats. 

30. Angelica Kauffman, 1741. 
Hide in thine own soul, and surprise 
The password of the unwary elves ; 
Seek it, thou canst not bribe their spies ; 
Unsought, they whisper it themselves. 

The Foot-Path. 

31. Halloween. 
The miracle fades out of history, 
But faith and wonder and the primal earth 
Are born into the world with every child. 

The Cathedral. 



NOVEMBER 1-3 

1. All Saints. 

One feast, of holy days the crest, 

I, though no Churchman, love to keep, 
All Saints, — the unknown good that rest 

In God's still memory folded deep ; 
The bravely dumb that did their deed, 

And scorned to blot it with a name, 
Men of the plain heroic breed, 

That loved Heaven's silence more than fame. 

All Saints. 

2. Marie Antoinette, 1755. 
Felt they no pang of passionate regret 
For those unsolid goods that seem so much our 

own ? 
These things are dear to every man that lives, 
And life prized more for what it lends than gives. 
Yea, many a tie, by iteration sweet, 
Strove to detain their fatal feet ; 
And yet the enduring half they chose, 
Whose choice decides a man life's slave or king, 
The invisible things of God before the seen and 

known : 
Therefore their memory inspiration blows 
With echoes gathering on from zone to zone. 

Ode Read at Concord. 

3. W. C. Bryant, 1794. 

What an antiseptic is a pure life ! 

Emerson the Lecturer. 



NOVEMBER 4-7 

4. Guido, 1575. 

To us the leafless autumn is not bare, 

Nor winter's rattling boughs lack lusty green. 

Our summer hearts make summer's fulness, where 

No leaf, or bud, or blossom may be seen : 

For nature's life in love's deep life doth lie. 

Sonnet XXI. 

5. Washington Allston, 1779. 

Each year to ancient friendships adds a ring, 
As to an oak, and precious more and more, 
Without deservingness or help of ours, 
They grow, and, silent, wider spread, each year, 
Their unbought ring of shelter or of shade. 

Under the Willows. 

5. Cornelius Conway Felton, 1807. 
Truth only needs to be for once spoke out, 
And there 's such music in her, such strange 

rhythm, 
As makes men's memories her joyous slaves. 

A Glance Behind the Curtain. 

7. William Croswell, 1804. 
The thing we long for, that we are 

For one transcendent moment, 
Before the Present poor and bare 

Can make its sneering comment. Longing. 



NOVEMBER 8-10 

8. Milton died, 1674. 

Slow are the steps of Freedom, but her feet 
Turn never backward : hers no bloody glare ; 

Her light is calm, and innocent, and sweet, 
And where it enters there is no despair. 

Ode to France. 

9. Boston Fire, 1872. 

Every man feels instinctively that all the beau- 
tiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a 

single lovely action. 

Rousseau and the Sentimentalists. 

10. Martin Luther, 1483. 

An imperturbable perception of the real relations 
of things is the Saxon's leading quality, . . . less 
than anything else will he have the sacramental 
wafer, — that beautiful emblem of our dependence 
on Him who giveth the daily bread ; less than 
anything will he have this smeared with that Bar- 
mecide butter of fair words. 

This is the lovely and noble side of his character. 
Indignation at this will make him forget crops and 
cattle ; and this, after so many centuries, will give 
him at last a poet in the Monk of Eisleben, who 
shall cut deep on the memory of mankind that 
brief creed of conscience, — Here am I. God help 
me : I cannot otherwise. Chaucer. 



NOVEMBER 11-13 

11. Martinmas. 
I do not mean to say that every one is fitted by 
nature or inclination for a definite course of study, 
or indeed for serious study in any sense. I am 
quite willing that these should " browse in a 
library," as Dr. Johnson called it, to their hearts' 
content. It is, perhaps, the only way in which time 
may be profitably wasted. Books and Libraries. 

12. Richard Baxter, 1615. 
I have observed that what men prize most is a 
privilege, even if it be that of chief mourner at a 
funeral. Democracy. 

13. St Augustine, 354. 

Yea truly, as the sallowing years 

Fall from us faster, like frost-loosened leaves 

Pushed by the misty touch of shortening days, 

And that unwakened winter nears, 
'T is the void chair our surest guests receives, 
'T is lips long cold that give the warmest kiss, 
'T is the lost voice comes oftenest to our ears ; 
We count our rosary by the beads we miss ; 

To me, at least, it seemeth so, 
An exile in the land once found divine, 

While my starved fire burns low, 
And homeless winds at the loose casement whine 
Shrill ditties of the snow-roofed Apennine. 

Agassiz. 



November 14-17 

14. L. J. M. Daguerre, 1787- 

New occasions teach new duties ; Time makes an- 
cient good uncouth ; 

They must upward still, and onward, who would 
keep abreast of Truth. the Present Crisis. 

15. William Coivper, 1731. 

To me Cowper is still the best of our descriptive 
poets of every-day wear. And what unobtrusive 
skill he has ! How he heightens, for example, 
your sense of winter - evening seclusion, by the 
twanging horn of the postman on the bridge ! That 
horn has rung in my ears ever since I first heard it, 
during the consulate of the second Adams. 

A Good Word for Winter. 

16. Charles Eliot Norton, 1827. 
Old friends ! The writing of those words has 

borne 
My fancy backward to the gracious past, 
The generous past, when all was possible, 
For all was then untried ; the years between 
Have taught some sweet, some bitter lessons, none 
Wiser than this, — to spend in all things else, 
But of old friends to be most miserly. 

Under the Willows. 

17. George Grote, 1794. 
Mere accuracy is to Truth as a plaster-cast to the 
marble statue. Harvard Anniversary Address. 



NOVEMBER 18-21 

18. Asa Gray, 1810. 
There is no wind but soweth seeds 
Of a more true and open life. 

An Incident in a Railroad Cab. 

19. Thorwaldsen, 1770. 
The poet's clearer eye should see, in all 

Earth's seeming woe, the seed of Heaven's flowers. 
Elegy on the Death of Dr. Channing. 

20. Thomas Chatterton, 1752. 
A public library should also have many and full 
shelves of political economy, for the dismal science, 
as Carlyle called it, if it prove nothing else, will go 
far towards proving that theory is the bird in the 
bush, though she sing more sweetly than the night- 
ingale, and that the millennium will not hasten its 
coming in deference to the most convincing string 
of resolutions that were ever unanimously adopted 
in public meeting. It likewise induces in us a pro- 
found and wholesome distrust of social panaceas. 

Books and Librardzs. 

21. Bryan Waller Procter, 1787. 
Console yourself, dear man and brother, whatever 
you may be sure of, be sure at least of this, that 
you are dreadfully like other people. 

On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners. 



NOVEMBER 22-24 

22. George Eliot, 1819. 
There is no work of genius which has not been 
the delight of mankind, no word of genius to which 
the human heart and soul have not, sooner or later, 
responded. But the man whom the genius takes 
possession of for its pen, for its trowel, for its pen- 
cil, for its chisel, him the world treats according to 
his deserts. Rousseau and the Sentimentalists. 

I have been told that Emerson and George Eliot 
agreed in thinking Rousseau's " Confessions " the 
most interesting book they had ever read. 

Books and Libraries. 

23. Ernest Wadsworth Longfellow, 1845. 
The first element of contemporary popularity is 
undoubtedly the power of entertaining. If a man 
have anything to tell, the world cannot be expected 
to listen to him unless he have perfected himself in 
the best way of telling it. Carlyle. 

24. H. T. Buckle, 1821. 
Words, ef you keep 'em, pay their keep, 

But gabble 's the short cut to ruin ; 
It ? s gratis, (gals half-price,) but cheap 
At no rate ef it henders doin'. 

Latest Vdjsws of Mr. Biglow. 



NOVEMBER 25-27 

25. Lope de Vega, 1562. 
O Land of Promise ! from what Pisgah's height 

Can I behold thy stretch of peaceful bowers, 
The golden harvests flowing out of sight, 

Thy nestled homes and sun-illumined towers ? 
Gazing upon the sunset's high-heaped gold, 
Its crags of opal and of chrysolite, 

Its deeps on deeps of glory, that unfold 
Still brightening abysses 
And blazing precipices, 
Whence but a scanty leap it seems to heaven 

Sometimes a glimpse is given 
Of thy more gorgeous realm, thy more unstinted 
blisses. To the Future. 

26. Empress Marie Feodorovna, 1847. 
Whoever can endure unmixed delight, whoever 
can tolerate music and painting and poetry all in 
one, whoever wishes to be rid of thought and to let 
the busy anvils of the brain be silent for a time, let 
him read in the " Faery Queen." There is the land 
of pure heart's ease, where no ache or sorrow of 
spirit can enter. Spenser. 

27. Frances Anne Kemble, 1809. 
A great writer does not reveal himself here and 
there, but everywhere. Chaucer. 



NOVEMBER 28 — DECEMBER 1 

28. William Blake, 1757. 
Let us speak plain : There is more force in names 
Than most men dream of ; and a lie may keep 
Its throne a whole age longer, if it skulk 
Behind the shield of some fair-seeming name. 

A Glance Behind the Curtain. 

29. Sir Philip Sidney, 1554. 
The sunshine seems blown off by the bleak wind, 
As pale as formal candles lit by day. 

An Indian-Summer Reverie. 

30. St. Andrew. 
On a map of the world you may cover Judea with 
your thumb, Athens with a finger-tip, and neither of 
them figures in the Prices Current ; but they still 
lord it in the thought and action of every civilized 
man. Harvard Anniversary Address. 



DECEMBER 

1. Alexandra, Princess of Wales, 1844. 
That lifted blade transformed our jangling clans, 
Till then provincial, to Americans, 
And made a unity of wildering plans ; 
Here was the doom fixed : here is marked the date 
When this New World awoke to man's estate, 
Burnt its last ship and ceased to look behind. 

Under the Old Elm. 



DECEMBER 2-4 

2. First Sunday in Advent. 
Darkness is strong, and so is Sin, 
But only God endures forever ! 

Villa Franca. 

3. Mary Lamb, 1764. 
The preludings of Winter are as beautiful as 
those of Spring. In a gray December day, when, 
as the farmers say, it is too cold to snow, his 
numbed fingers will let fall doubtfully a few star- 
shaped flakes, the snow-drops and anemones that 
harbinger his more assured reign. Now, and now 
only, may be seen, heaped on the horizon's eastern 
edge, those "blue clouds " from forth which Shake- 
speare says that Mars "doth pluck the masoned 
turrets." Sometimes, also, when the sun is low, 
you will see a single cloud trailing a flurry of snow 
along the southern hills in a wavering fringe of 
purple. And when at last the real snow-storm 
comes, it leaves the earth with a virginal look on it 
that no other of the seasons can rival, — compared 
with which, indeed, they seem soiled and vulgar. 
A Good Word for Winter. 

4. Carlyle, 1795. 
Though not the safest of guides in politics or 
practical philosophy, his value as an inspirer and 
awakener cannot be overestimated. Carlyle. 



DECEMBER 5-8 

5. Martin Van Buren, 1782. 
As matters stand, too, it is beginning to be doubt- 
ful whether Parliament and Congress sit at West- 
minster and Washington or in the editors' rooms of 
the leading journals, so thoroughly is everything 
debated before the authorized and responsible de- 
baters get on their legs. Democracy. 

6. Richard H. Barham, 1788. 

Simple as it seems, it was a great discovery that 
the key of knowledge could turn both ways, that it 
could open as well as lock, the door of power to the 
many. The only things a New-Englander was ever 
locked out of were the jails. 

New England Two Centuries Ago. 

7. Allan Cunningham, 1784. 
We may reckon up pretty exactly a man's advan- 
tages and defects as an artist ; these he has in com- 
mon with others, and they are to be measured by a 
recognized standard ; but there is something in his 
genius that is incalculable. Dante. 

8. Horace, 65 B. C. 
Therefore think not the Past is wise alone, 
For Yesterday knows nothing of the Best, 
And thou shalt love it only as the nest 
Whence glory-winged things to Heaven have flown. 

Sonnet 18. 



DECEMBER 9-12 

9. John Milton, 1608. 
The grand loneliness of Milton in his latter years, 
while it makes him the most impressive figure in our 
literary history, is reflected also in his maturer 
poems by a sublime independence of human sym- 
pathy like that with which mountains fascinate and 
rebuff US. Milton. 

10. W. L. Garrison, 1805. 

In a small chamber, friendless and unseen, 

Toiled o'er his types one poor, unlearned young 
man ; 
The place was dark, unfurnitured, and mean ; — 
Yet there the freedom of a race began. 

To W. L. Garrison. 

11. Death of Charles XII., 1718. 

I am conscious that life has been trying to civilize 

me for now nearly seventy years with what seem to 

me very inadequate results. We cannot afford to 

wait, but the Race can. 

Harvard Anniversary Address. 

12. Heinrich Heine, 1797. 

Skill, wisdom, and even wit are cumulative ; but 

that diviner faculty, which is the spiritual eye, 

though it may be trained and sharpened, cannot be 

added to by taking thought. Carlyle. 



DECEMBER 13-15 

13. Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, 1815. 

We, listening, learned what makes the might of 

words, — 
Manhood to back them, constant as a star. 

On Boaed the '76. 

I think the one leading characteristic of Dean 
Stanley — and I say it to his praise — was the 
amount of human nature there was in him. 

Stanley. 

14. Washington died. 1799. 
Our sense, refined with virtue of the spot, 

Across the mists of Lethe's sleepy stream 
Recalls him, the sole chief without a blot, 

Xo more a pallid image and a dream 
But as he dwelt with men decorously supreme. 

Under the Old Elm. 

15. Henry Chorley, 1808. 
He could interpret well the wondrous voices 

Which to the calm and silent spirit come ; 
He knew that the One Soul no more rejoices 

In the star's anthem than the insect's hum. 
He in his heart was ever meek and humble, 

And yet with kindly pomp his numbers ran, 
As he foresaw how all things false should crumble 

Before the free, uplifted soul of man. ode. 



DECEMBER 16-18 

16. Boston Tea Party, 1773. 
It is good for us to commemorate this homespun 
past of ours ; good, in these days of a reckless and 
swaggering prosperity, to remind ourselves how 
poor our fathers were, and that we celebrate them 
because for themselves and their children they chose 
wisdom and understanding and the things that are 
of God rather than any other riches. 

Harvard Anniversary Address. 

17. Beethoven, 1770. 
One can't bear Strauss when his nature is cloven 
To its deeps within deeps by the stroke of Beetho- 
ven. A Fable for Critics. 

We feel all through it, [Paradise Lost] as in the 
symphonies of Beethoven, a great controlling reason, 
in whose safe-conduct we trust implicitly. Milton. 

18. Charles Wesley, 1708. 
You may disarm the hands, but not the brains, of 
a people, and to know what should be defended is 
the first condition of successful defense. 

New England Two Centuries Ago. 



DECEMBER 19-22 
19. J. M. W. Turner died, 1851. 

Our nipping climate hardly suits 
The ripening of ideal fruits. 

Studies for Two Heads. 

20. John Wilson Croker, 1780. 
How much more admirable is this tawny vigor, 
the badge of fruitful toil, than the crop of early 
muscle that heads out under the forcing glass of the 
gymnasium ! Italy. 

21. Leopold von Ranlce, 1795. 
There was never colony save this that went forth, 
not to seek gold, but God. 

On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners. 

22. Landing of the Pilgrims, 1620. 
Did they flee from persecution to become them- 
selves persecutors in turn ? This means only that 
they would not permit their holy enterprise to be 
hindered or their property to be damaged even by 
men with the most pious intentions and as sincere, 
if not always so wise, as they. They would not 
stand any nonsense, as the phrase is, a mood of mind 
from which their descendants seem somewhat to 
have degenerated. They were no more unreason- 
able than the landlady of Taylor the Platonist in re- 
fusing to let him sacrifice a bull to Jupiter in her 
Dack-parlor. Harvard Anniversary Address. 



DECEMBER 23-26 

23. Sainte-Beuve, 1804. 
Within the hall are song and laughter, 

The cheeks of Christmas glow red and jolly ; 
And sprouting is every corbel and rafter, 
With lightsome green of ivy and holly. 

The Vision of Sir Launfal. 

24. Matthew Arnold, 1822. 
A graciousness in giving that doth make 
The smalPst gift greatest, and a sense most meek 
Of worthiness, that doth not fear to take 
From others. Irene. 

25. Sir Isaac Newton, 1642. 
Walking the New Earth, 
Lo, a divine One 
Greets all men godlike, 
Calls them his kindred, 
He, the Divine. 

Is it Thor's hammer 
Rays in his right hand ? 
Weaponless walks he ; 
It is the White Christ, 
Stronger than Thor. 

The Voyage to Vinland. 

26. Thomas Gray, 1716. 
Not what we give, but what we share, — 
For the gift without the giver is bare. 

The Vision of Sir Launfal. 



DECEMBER 27-29 

27. St. John Evangelist. 
Yet after he was dead and gone, 

And e'en his memory dim, 
Earth seemed more sweet to live upon, 
More full of love, because of him. 

The Shepherd of King Admettus. 

28. C. M. Sedgwick, 1789. 
For love is blind but with the fleshly eye, 
That so its inner sight may be more clear ; 
And outward shows of beauty only so 
Are needful at the first, as is a hand 
To guide and to uphold an infant's steps : 
Great spirits need them not, their earnest look 
Pierces the body's mask of thin disguise, 
And beauty ever is to them revealed, 
Behind the unshapeliest, meanest lump of clay, 
With arms outstretched and eager face ablaze, 

Yearning to be but understood and loved. 

Love. 

29. W. E. Gladstone, 1809. 
Of one thing, at least, we may be certain, that, 
under whatever method of helping things to go 
wrong man's wit can contrive, those who have the 
divine right to govern will be found to govern in the 
end, and that the highest privilege to which the 
majority of mankind can aspire is that of being gov- 
erned by those wiser than they. Democracy. 



DECEMBER 30, 31 

30. George H. Lewes died, 1878. 
Whatever of true life there was in thee 

Leaps in our age's veins ; 
Wield still the bent and wrinkled empery, 
And shake thine idle chains ; — 
To thee thy dross is clinging, 
For us thy martyrs die, thy prophets see, 
Thy poets still are singing. 

Here, mid the bleak waves of our strife and care, 

Float the green Fortunate Isles 
Where all thy hero-spirits dwell, and share 
Our martyrdoms and toils ; 
The present moves attended 
With all of brave and excellent and fair 
That made the old time splendid. 

To the Past. 

31. James T. Fields, 1816. 

Cast leaves and feathers rot in last year's nest ; 
The winged brood, flown thence, new dwellings 

plan ; 
The serf of his own Past is not a man ; 
To change and change is life, to move and never 

rest ; — 
Not what we are, but what we hope is best. 

The Pioneer. 



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